


Thing of Ash

by Aerithari



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes & Sam Wilson Friendship, Bucky Barnes Feels, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Minor Wanda Maximoff/Vision, Multi, Pining, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Bucky Barnes, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson Friendship, Wanda Maximoff friendship, honestly i just need to get this out of my head, my alien marvel fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-06-09 04:25:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6889927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerithari/pseuds/Aerithari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“At what point is someone not worth saving?” Aisling asked Bucky. She looked at him, straight in the eye, and she challenged him to answer the same philosophy that had driven her from her home.</p><p>But he bit his quivering lip and said nothing.</p><p>--</p><p>In The Quiet Lands (otherwise known as Nebraska), an unusual people live in secret on Earth - but one of their women, hidden with the Wakandans, makes a decision that shatters the silence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly...sorry? I've had this spinning around in my head for a while and need to get it out so enjoy this weird thing I invented. Original character I stuffed into the MCU. Sorry in advance for inaccuracies but also im trash....clearly

_We are aliens_ , she breathed into the glass.

He couldn’t hear her. She watched him sleep, single arm uncommonly still, frost collecting on his metal shoulder and she felt, acutely, that he understood, even in silence. His eyes hurt.

She placed a hand against the coolness of the pane. Nothing can help him in such a state. It confused her that even the Wakandans let this pass by, as if they could not afford the secrets and the pain it would add to the human ledger.

She plugged in a code, stored quietly in memory for a use such as this. Forgiveness would come later. She would clear all their debts – the air sizzled with the truth of it, even if she knew it came of her own conviction. Her mother called it dangerous, the righteousness that seized her heart. The misfortune of Humanity, the people from the Quiet Lands, shining bright as the fluorescents above her head. Her mother smiled at such a fault.

Perhaps Mother didn’t know, the way it weighed on her.

The man’s chamber hissed as it grew warm, and she held her breath. Her world, for a single moment, was whole and quiet, distilled into a single point just beneath her ribs, where she could feel her heart convulse. He opened his eyes and her world spun for the righteousness of it – for the rules and laws she was bound to be breaking, the air she remembered to take in.

“Hello,” she whispered.

He frowned into the sudden light. She beamed and beamed and beamed.

\--

She was pleased T’Challa found her first, even if his level spirit crackled like stone close to breaking. He regarded her with such sudden, cold fear that her face blanched. She feared nothing that could harm her, except the eyes of those she loved.

Looking at her like she didn’t _know_ what it was she did.

“I have found a solution,” she announced, bringing every bit of joy to bear. She imagines ringing the bell in the highest steeple of the old church in her small Nebraskan town, bringing all – aliens and humans and creatures, all – to the heart of it. But he does not smile. He is stone to her, after all these years, and looks at her with deep sadness.

“Is it happening to you again?” he asked.

Something in her chest dropped out. A trap door. She forgot her strength is weakness to everyone else. That she will see what they don’t want to look at.

“No.” She’s not sure what else to say.

“Illusions do not become real,” he said to her, and the Lights come roaring back, prickling at her ears.

“That’s not this.” She puts her hands up as T’Challa comes closer and shakes her head. “No. You see this man, don’t you?”

James Buchanan Barnes. Standing to the side, hair plastered to his face again, watching, deadened. T’Challa nods slowly.

“I see that he is awake when he should not be.”

“He is not an illusion,” she said again. “He is flesh and blood and he was frozen away because everyone would prefer to be afraid.”

T’Challa raised his brow, crossing his arms carefully across his chest, keeping his legs and body straight as an arrow. Unreadable – a skill he’d mastered in her presence, knowing she’d weaponize any emotion he’d express. He looks at the unfrozen man and nods at him. “I apologize, Mr. Barnes. Aisling is dear to us…and a maker of mischief, of a sorts.”

Dear to us. Aisling. Ash-ling, thing of ash. She purses her lips. _But we do not listen to her silly thoughts._

“Wait,” she said. The moment was slipping out of her grasp. “Stop. You are just going to put him back in there?” Her voice climbs upward, unwanted, and the Lights swirl into panic. She’d never get another chance.

“Do I get a say in this?”

James Buchanan Barnes. His voice, still husky and cold. He leaned against a sterile steel table, forehead in his single hand.

She whirls to face him so fast he jumps. She immediately springs back, guilty. People were always so much more alive in person.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course.”

He stared at her again, as if his eyes couldn’t adjust when he looked at her. Her hand floated to her necklace, afraid her glamour broke. Afraid that the Lights could be seen through her dark skin. But no.

“No one put him there against his will, young sister,” T’Challa said. “He chose it, to protect himself.”

Her brow furrowed. She felt like she was digging underneath a wall, hitting stone after stone after stone, a foundation that went on forever. “I know that. But that was before everything else was known.”

“I have to go back,” said James Buchanan Barnes. He sounded tired and eroded.

She was rather floored by that. Her mouth popped open. He was betraying her and he didn’t even know he was doing it, but he was…

“No,” she said again.

“Don’t do this,” T’Challa muttered. “Aisling. Please.”

“No!” The word poured out, anger bleeding. She put her hands on her forehead. Illusions and dreams are of the same silk, her mother would say. Your ideas of people are noble. But the world is dangerous.

She hated that truth. She railed against it. She _existed_ against the very idea of it, though her mother’s wisdom was a warm constant. The world didn’t have to be this way, and she could prove it to them, if she could have a chance to prove herself _one time_ , to be let out of her gilded cage for _a single moment_ to help another living being…

T’Challa regarded her coolly. She could see what will come next: Oh yes, dear Aisling, we’ve seen this before. Your delusions of what can be done, of what is right. Do you remember your people sent you to us, their only known ally, because they were afraid of you?

Half-human, half-Sitorai. Half commoner, half royalty. For whom there would be no bench mark. No normal.

(She knows he would never say this. He is always both highest paragon and worst cruelty in her mind, an older brother she would never really have. He is the only person she knows that is better in reality than the version in her own mind.)

But the frozen man speaks instead.

“Well, what is it?” he said. “What do you know?”

He sounded like old rock again, but his voice was softer. Eager and afraid, dovetailing into…this. A James Buchanan Barnes.

She smiled.

The bells were ringing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im gonna experiment with tense deal with it  
> also will you read this if I promise you steve and wanda and falcon will likely make a showing at some point  
> "maybe" shouts the tiny audience.  
> well they are coming! but right now deal with my alien ok bye

_Moments before:_

He stumbles out of the ice cradle. She guides him, steering his shoulders. The metal bites her fingers, but his skin is oddly soft. _I know you._

It was the feeling that had chased her out of the room at first. She’d looked upon him and suddenly her every tendril with which she sensed the world was seized by sorrow. She ran, palms to her eyes to block the stupid tears that sprung unwillingly. It wasn’t until she hunted for his file that she could crack open the feeling like a quartz.

He was a transplant. Older than he should be, and yet, still cursed with youth. A moment had come that changed everything, and now he was here where he should not be with a mind tuned to a song he did not want to hear. Unnatural. Like her.

Only that moment for her, sadly, was her birth.

Not much choice in that.

She forgets to speak until, she realizes, he has grabbed her wrist. She gasps.

“Who are you?” He is tense, leaning into her. She blinks at him. Ancestors, but she’d rehearsed this!

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You are still in Wakanda, among friends. I am Aisling.”

“Do I know you?”

She feels an odd sensation – her heart ticking down a rung on a ladder.

“No,” she says. “I suppose not.”

He lets go of her wrist at once, and she realizes she still held him by his shoulders. She takes an immediate step back. Her world spun for a single moment. His eyes, gray like moon pools. His mouth, a straightforward line, splotched with…24-hour shadow.

His single arm, tensed to throw a punch.

She weakly waves at his arm and shakes her head. _You don’t need to do that._ She takes another step back and lets the Light spin with possibility. Inch by inch, he relaxed out of battle posture, and she said nothing. She was busy listening. People were coming to stop her, and she needed to call on her imaginarium for strength. She was a secret agent, a hero. She would find a way to defeat their enemies.

 “Why did you wake me up?” he asks, voice shaking.

His eyes are searching, confused, wild – _frightened_. It strikes her so suddenly, that he was here and he was afraid, that guilt and worry threaten to erupt into hot tears. No. There’s no time for that.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I didn’t do this to scare you. Honestly. You can believe that.”

_Really. You can believe that? Very trustworthy, Aisling._

He stares at her for a few moments too long. She fiddles with the edge of her sweater. The silence extends too long for her confidence.

“You are James Buchanan Barnes,” she says, as if that is explanation enough. “Right? I didn’t overhear the wrong conversation?”

He almost smiles at that. A shadow of it, flickering at the edges of his mouth. But his eyes harden.

“What?”

“Y-you…” The words fumble away. Of course he wouldn’t know that T’Challa records damn near everything, and that she found out about him from crashing into the surveillance room on a bad day, got the code to his chamber on a very good one. She tugs one last time on her shirt, for confidence. For strength. _I am a queen, a healer who listens._ She straightens her fingers out, toward the earth.

 “I know how to fix you.”

_And make us both free._

\--

Their first session started the next day. After thick afternoon rains, she led him to a sleek balcony that overlooked the misty forests of Wakanda, just outside of her apartment’s parlor room. She clutched two mats, and fiddled with them in silence as both Emma and Bucky stood to the side, bemused, until she had arranged them on the stone floor precisely as she wished.

She gestured toward the mat across from hers as she sat.

He sat slowly, like he was afraid he was getting punked. Emma eyed him so fiercely she wondered if the man could feel her eyes burning holes into his skin.

“James. Mr. Barnes.”

 “It’s just Bucky,” the man said to her. He was looking at the floor, but he looked…amused. Like he was thinking of something happier in the distance. “You don’t have to call me by my full name every time.”

He looked up and she realized he was smiling, sort of. He at least didn’t look mad, and he was looking at her for the first time since T’Challa essentially threw his hands up and said _I am going to go call some people about this and also tell everyone that no, no one tried to break in and kidnap him again, thank you. Mr. Barnes, please come with me and also Aisling, I’m going to get Emma._

So, yesterday.

Emma was not pleased. A bodyguard hated it when their charge wandered off, which Aisling was preternaturally good at doing, and they particularly hated when their charges released unknown frozen super soldiers for reasons so far unclear. She lingered to the side of the balcony, arms crossed so tightly across her ribs that Aisling wondered how the woman was breathing.

Emma was one of her best friends. One of her only friends. But even Emma struggled to keep up with Aisling’s…ways.

It was to be expected. She was a pale human girl from their town, Lomora, Nebraska, who volunteered to go with Aisling as her protector and advocate when her Mother sent her to Wakanda for…training? Study? She had forgotten the excuse her Mother gave to the people. It’d been three years since she’d left.

Emma was too tall, too broad-shouldered, too quiet for her fundamentalist parents, for the willowy girls at her school. Kept her hair short, liked to put succulents in little bowls and felt more comfortable around cows than people. She never told Aisling why she volunteered, exactly, except: “No one else knows how to deal with you.” Aisling’s answer was different: They were too much alike.

“Bucky.” Aisling tested the name, face flushing a little at how stupidly short it was. She could never choose just one of his names because none of them seemed to fit. This nickname certainly explained why. “Not Jim?”

A weird choked sound came out of him in such a broken way it took her a moment to realize he had laughed at her. “Not Jim. No.”

“Your mother really called you Bucky?”

He raised an eyebrow at her, a smile lingering on his face. “No.” His eyes flicked to the floor again for a moment before he added, like an afterthought: “My mom hated it, actually.”

He looked oddly young, when he looked at the floor like that, in the moments between tilting his head and letting his hair fall like curtain in front of his face. She liked looking at him, she found, embarrassingly. There was something magnetizing about the way his face moved. How his eyes looked like doors to other places.

 “You need a haircut,” she said.

_Oh my god I just said that outloud._

She heard Emma snort to cover a laugh. His smile relaxed, grew. He tugged once at the hair in front of his eyes and nodded slowly, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. She watched his smile, willing it to grow like an orchid in her greenhouse.

“Why did you wake me up?” he asked. It was different this time. More curious. Less cold, less horrified. But it was her turn to look away, anywhere but at him, as the thoughts scattered like insects found in the light. The question was layered. Why did you wake _me_ up? Why did _you_ wake me up?

Moments were slowing. She would need an answer, and suddenly she could find none. _My people can bend minds. I hated seeing you alone in there. I was bored._ Her imaginarium teased her, as it always did when she felt uncomfortable, as a way of escape. Emma cleared her throat.

“T did his magic,” the bodyguard said. She pointedly sat down next to Aisling and placed a soft but steady hand on her shoulder. A reminder. A way back. “They’re allowing it under strict conditions. Neither of you are allowed to leave the palace, for one.”

Her voice had a deceptively sweet Midwestern twang. Aisling borrowed strength from it.

“I also have problems,” Aisling said. She increased the wattage of her own smile until she could feel it glowing in her face and she turned the force of its power on him. “I thought we would have a few things in common.”

She knew she was pretty from the way men responded to her. The way they made allowances for her, the way they rushed to clear the way for her. The way their eyes moved. She had a delicate face, with full lips and dark eyes, sculpted cheekbones, smooth terra cotta skin. But Bucky did not look charmed by this. It relieved her, somewhat, that he would not be fooled by the simple smile of a woman. He looked…distant, like he was trying hard not to see her at all.

“You?” he said. Her heart fluttered, frustrated – was he _teasing_ her? “Problems?”

Sitting cross-legged, she leaned on one arm and raised an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t hear dearest T’Challa, before?”

“That you’re crazy?”

Emma’s hand clenched on her shoulder – Aisling had almost forgotten it was there. She felt her eyes burn, but in an icy instant, she realized that the usual laughter, the usual snide dismissiveness she was used to from those who usually asked was entirely absent from his question.

“Are you asking as an equal?” she said stonily.

A ghost smile flickered across his face. “You _did_ wake me from self-imposed cryogenic sleep.”

She glared at him, unsure what else to do with her face. “You’re right,” she said. “We are both crazy.”

He looked off, toward the forest, once again unreadable. She looked at the floor.

“This is going well,” Emma muttered.

Aisling took in a deep breath and released the fists she’d formed – one on her knee, the other against the cool floor. Of the two, she was clearly less crazy. She wanted free reign of her life so badly, she couldn’t wrap her head around choosing isolation and the cold over the afternoon storms, the mist, the pungent flowers of dawn. The way children laughed during country fairs in the summer. The way young boys would rush to hold open doors for everyone, to prove something.

Or perhaps he was less crazy. Perhaps he understood his limits, and she breathlessly drifted through the world half-awake to try and prove it wrong. She was an unknown, for whom there should have been no limits. In a louder world, limits imposed themselves. She chose her own prison, and pretended it wasn’t such a thing.

“I thought maybe you, like me, would want a way out,” she said softly. “I’m sorry if I was wrong.”

“You aren’t wrong,” he said, matching her tone for tone. “I do want that.” He looked askance at her, as if afraid he had hurt her feelings before. Maybe T’Challa’s words did hang heavy on him. Maybe he doubted her intentions.

“But?”

“It’s complicated.”

She snorted. “So are you also a half royal alien hybrid beset by bad men and unknowable things?”

Ah. There it was. The widened eyes. The mouth, turned downward. The first crack in his wall.

“Trust me,” she said. “Complicated doesn't scare me.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #plot happens hence the length.  
> it was like i woke up and was like "this should probably have a direction" and voila.  
> i promise it isn't gonna be dark dark dark all the time but thats what happens when Bucky is like a walking angst bucket and I don't know how to write "X walks to the door" without an emotion.  
> but there are some Funny Times here and there.

_“Fight not your brother,_  
_He who scolds and harms you._  
_Sickness shackles the body_  
_but violence pains the Ancestors._ ”

Translation by Her Holiness the Queen Yunara Ashara Siuvara III, from the Sitorai Verses

\--

Aisling awoke screaming.

Emma’s round face, eyes wide as oceans, loomed large. Her hands held Aisling’s shoulders like heavy stone and her knees, astride Aisling’s middle, kept the woman from thrashing herself onto the floor. It took another second for the screaming to stop.

Aisling’s eyes rolled in her skull. They had been running through tar, through sound made solid, her whole body shaking as a voice she’d long banished to the dark slithered through her body like shadow made silk. Where was she? Who…who was the man behind Emma, still as the night, watching her with a tense frown and shining eyes?

 “Run!” she tried to scream. “Get away!”

 But undecipherable syllables fell out first. Emma took in a sharp, shaky breath.

An odd calm fell over Aisling in that moment.

Emma. She was okay. They were all fine…had they escaped?

“Aisling. It’s Emma. You’re okay.” Emma released her vice grip on Aisling’s shoulders and instead touched her cheek. She sounded like she’d recited these words before, but her voice shook. “You’re in Wakanda with T’Challa and me and…God. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Reality set in slowly, like a curtain settling from a wind storm. She hadn’t just been running. She’d just been here, sleeping alone and in comfort. She had been dreaming.

_Wakanda. Emma. T’Challa. The man…_

_Bucky._

Emma turned back toward the man as Aisling set her eyes upon him.

“Leave,” the woman snapped.

“You don’t—” Aisling protested, but her voice caught in her throat when their eyes met in a short, electric moment.

He left, wordless.

“They’re coming back,” Emma muttered as she gingerly climbed off of Aisling and to the side of the bed. She gripped Aisling’s hand and Aisling gripped back as the horror returned. “Stronger now.”

“I haven’t had the nightmare in a week.”

“I’ve been tracking them,” Emma said, matter-of-fact. “At this rate, the next one will come in three days.”

Aisling pushed the thought away, but it came back in like the tide – stronger, fraught with fear, frustration. How long until she wouldn’t be able to surface at all? How long until…until his damn curse would keep her there, forever running, forever afraid, forever… _conquered_.

“Why?” Aisling said. “Why now?”

Emma shrugged, but couldn’t look at her. “I’ve been tapping our people. They suspect he has been…moving again.” She squeezed Aisling’s hand. “But he won’t make it here. He’s half the man he was before Her Holiness banished him. And he wasn’t much before that.”

Aisling said nothing.

“I promise, Ash. No one here will let anything happen.”

She looked down at her hands, one gripping her sheets fiercely. She settled her mind, stepped into the center. She opened her fist and reached out to the energies of the world to re-align herself. Emma’s deeply familiar soul, fluttery and bright, edged with metal. The dust of those who’d stayed here before, the lingering, kind ember that was T’Challa…

Her head snapped to the door. Bucky had left the room, but his spirit lingered outside. So young and raw and jagged. He’d been almost a child when he joined the army back in the 1940s. With his whole life stripped bare, the basics came back in funny ways.

Like defending the door of a woman he barely knew from a threat that was clearly inside her own head.

“What?” Emma said, turning toward the door herself.

“Nothing,” Aisling said. “You know you can trust our dear Bucky Barnes, though, don’t you? He’s rather harmless without his metal arm.”

Emma barked a laugh, but even in the twilight, Aisling could tell the amusement didn’t reach her eyes.

“Ash.” She shifted on the bed. “Sorry. But I’m never going to trust a man around you ever again.”

\--

Moments before:

A scream.

He hurls himself out of his too-soft bed, the damp sheets wrapped around his waist, his legs, his single arm like ropes. He trips, still calculating for a heavy metal arm that no longer exists, and collapses on the ground for a moment. But the scream continues, on and on, and the floor is too clean for this to be a dream. Too warm. Too…on purpose.

He sorts through the variables. Runs through the memories.

Wakanda. Meaning T’Challa is here. Steve – gone. On the run. This is his apartment. Too big. No weapons.

A sobbing scream. The dark eyes that woke him. Next door.

In an instant, he is at his door. He presses a button that slides it open and steps out to see the mousy-haired, broad bodyguard scrambling out of her own room, shoddy sleep clothes wrinkled and twisted, eyes large and full of fear.

She spots him and glares.

“Go away,” she says. She fiddles with the door code too long. Her fingers are shaking. Bucky steps up, heart throbbing and seizing and _hurting_.

“What’s going on?” He can’t tell if he is shouting. Blood is roaring in his ears. He readies himself for a fight. The bodyguard – Emma – doesn’t answer. The door slides open and she clambers in without a second glance at him. He follows close behind, readying a swing.

But no one is there, except Emma and the screaming woman, wrapped in her sheets, thrashing wildly. _She could hurt herself_ , he realizes, but Emma is ahead of him, and is climbing atop her bed, trying to stabilize her.

“Ash! Aisling! Wake up girl, come on!”

Emma shouts back until the woman’s eyes fly open.

A nightmare. A crawling, horrible night terror. People don’t scream like that for simple dreams. People don’t scream like that who have lived simple lives. _I have problems, too._

He’s sent away, but he won’t be able to sleep again. His whole body is vibrating, though his arm and legs are still. Something old in him says you can’t leave a person behind like that. You can’t let them suffer from fear like that alone.

So he stands watch until he sees dawn light filter in under her door.

\--

_An instinct. He expects dank, snow-melt walls, yellow-stained bulbs, words in a language he shouldn’t know. Cold, dry air that sticks to his skin, the smell of rubbing alcohol, a weapon pressed into his hand._

_He awakes to white light, the air dry, but warm. Dark eyes, a blinding smile, a halo of wild, black springing curls. Delicate hands on his shoulders, a small gasp when he grips her wrist by instinct._

_Hello._

_A whisper from a dream._

\--

His eyes snapped open.

Aisling clapped her hands together and smiled brightly. A curl fell down into her face.

“That was good!” Aisling said. “I don’t know what you saw but you accessed and lived within a memory for a second. I could see you go there.”

“I don’t like this,” he says, unbidden. He flushed. There were lots of things he didn’t want to see at all.

“I know,” she said. She sounded rapt, captured by the…notion of it all. Like she was surprised it even worked.

That wasn’t reassuring.

“That’s why we’re starting slowly, in brighter parts of your mind. More recent things. How did the memory feel to you? Did it feel authentic?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

“Did it feel like you had a floor underneath you? Like you couldn’t just fall away in an instant? Could you see the paths from it?”

His face turned brighter red. Normally he’d tease her, tell her she wasn’t making any sense, but he was too tired for it. Regardless of the fact that something rang oddly true about that description. “I guess.”

She nodded. “Good. Dreams and falsehoods feel like…like part of you isn’t there actually. Like there’s important data missing. A missing limb where there should be one.” She grinned devilishly and he smirked. He rubbed his metal shoulder. His new arm – sans any markings – was still in the adjustment phase, and occasionally zinged him with burning pains.  “We’re going to work to help you find the difference, first.”

He nodded and looked at the floor. He slipped his hands back into her extended palms and closed his eyes, ready to try again, because he knew she’d ask.

“Well, you are being nice today,” she said brightly. But there was something else behind it, like there’d been all afternoon. A fakeness. “I think we should stop.”

“What?”

“You heard me. No need to pretend to be sad on my account.”

He smirked and looked up at her. Long fingers brushed down her grey, long sweater, against her jeans, removing dust he couldn’t see. She always looked vaguely cold, which was hard to believe in a place like this. She caught his gaze and looked back.

Her cheery brilliance had all been a creepily pleasant ruse. Something had cracked inside that woman. After letting her…what? Examine his head? He still wasn’t sure what was going on _there_ but regardless – he could almost see the cracked mirror behind her dark eyes.

“Maybe we should try something with your hands,” she mumbled all of a sudden. “Maybe that will help.”

Now he was really blushing. _Stop that, Barnes._

“My what now?”

She laughed. “Maybe it will help if you do something with your hands when we do this. Like knit. To help you get out of your mind space. It helps me.”

“Right,” he said as he stood up. “Knit in my rocking chair like an old grandma.”

“You _are_ a 90-year-old man. Maybe you should act more like it.”

He crosses his arms lightly, smiling. “Yell at kids who cross my lawn.”

“You could knit yourself a hat to hide your red ears.”

His mouth popped open. His mind became a series of exclamation points, until he realized his hair covered most of his ears, and she was _laughing_ —

“I’m sorry!” She was doubled over almost. “I’m sorry. Your reaction was perfect.”

He huffed, hiding a smile under his hand. “Guess you earned that one.”

She smiled at him from some faraway place. It was real and it faded, just as fast. She turned away and started folding up her mat, hair falling into her face, hiding it.

He put a hand behind his head, suddenly the awkward boy from Brooklyn. He thought he could have shaken that part of his life by now, but the memories of youth stuck like glue. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

She rose from her bend with preternatural grace, but did not turn to face him, “About what, dear Mr. Barnes?”

“We don’t have to.” He was stumbling. He was stuck now, thinking of Brooklyn. _You always find the ones who need help, James_. His mother, speaking to him about Steve. _How do you do it?_ He didn’t deserve those memories anymore. 

“God knows I don’t want to talk about my—but you know…I’ll listen, if it’ll help.”

She didn’t move for a long moment. But slowly he could see her arms tighten around the mats, now both rolled up in her arm’s grasp.

“It’s complicated,” she said. Not without a hint of sarcasm, naturally. But the odd polite veneer returned swiftly. “It would take a while to explain and I’ve already taken up much of your day.”

She started to walk away.

“Wait a second. Wait. Why are you doing this?” He felt like someone who was reaching out to be caught, realizing at the last second she was letting him drop. _Her small gasp. Hello._ He puts a hand to his head. She was right, as always – it was time to stop, because everything was spinning. “You don’t owe me anything.”

She turned back toward him and stared him straight in the eye. Challenging him. But struggling against something larger than either of them.

“Because I saw someone who needed help.” Her eyes shone. “Someone should get to leave this place and go home.”

“But that’s the thing,” he said. “I didn’t do anything to you. Why me?”

“Everyone deserves it.” Her arms shook. “Most of all people who others fear for no reason.”

“I _chose this_ for a reason,” he said, measured. “I’m dangerous. I appreciate the help but—”

“I read your stupid file!” She shouted the words, bitter. He realized fat tears were rolling down her face. _God I will never hear the end of this from Emma._ She looked away and regained composure. “You have problems. Obviously. But that doesn’t mean they should _lock you up_ and hope for a better answer that may never come.”

It struck him, then. He tried to cross the room to meet her – old instinct hated seeing women cry – but she stepped back from him and he felt like his ribs were cracking all over again. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you…home?”

Her well-bred politeness crumbled. Her mouth trembled, like she was trying hard to hold two halves of her face together as tears rolled down.

“I’m from Nebraska.” Her voice warbled.

Nebraska. Simple as that?

“I’m from Brooklyn,” He tried to smile for her. “Two sides of Americana, huh?”

“I know,” she mumbled. She shuffled with the mats until they largely blocked her expression. But he had seen it. The anger mired with hopelessness that dulled her eyes into charcoal.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have an appointment. I will see you tomorrow?”

She left it as a question he didn’t answer. She moved to leave.

“Wait,” he said.

She didn’t.

\--

_It’s him, and at first her heart swells with love. She runs toward him, he and his eyes of amber-gold and flecks of green, unnatural eyes, even for her people, particularly for a Glamour. Tamryn. They could be strange together. Neither of them, fitting in._

_But then she falls. Her head karangs against a wooden floor, and he is on top of her as her eyes throb. Nothing is clear._

_“You’re finally mine…”_

_And she remembers._

_But it’s too late. Tamryn kisses her so hard her head explodes._

\--

Both Emma and Bucky knew something was wrong before Aisling even went to sleep. They could sense it, crackling in the air. The woman had locked herself in her room after the training session. Emma tried to walk it off, pacing up and down the hallways like she could find the invader before it struck. Bucky couldn’t take that (and knew Emma blamed him for this anyway) – instead, he holed up in his room and lied still as he possibly could.

Until the screams started.

Emma, Bucky and T’Challa circled around the King’s desk. Emma rubbed her arms and looked at the ticking, bronze clock, hanging on the room’s intricately painted walls for the third time in five minutes.

“Why is _he_ here?” Emma was pointedly not looking at Bucky. “This is his fault.”

T’Challa eyed the young woman. “It’s no one’s fault.”

“It likely _is_ my fault,” Bucky allowed. “This time.”

“You know why he’s here,” T’Challa said, bringing his attention back to his desk as if Bucky hadn’t said anything. Like a father coddling squabbling children. “Because Aisling decided to take matters into her own hands. And because…I believe there may an alternative to cryo-stasis, if you will accept it, Mr. Barnes.”

Bucky opened his mouth to fight it. But he also couldn’t deny that he might… _might_ choose another option, if presented.

He had chosen Aisling’s, after all. Even if that felt like silly meditation lessons so far.

He rubbed his tired eyes. Man is selfish.

After tapping a few hapiographic buttons, T’Challa leaned back in his chair. A holographic video feed opened up and Steve Rogers appeared on the screen. Wanda Maximoff was in the co-pilot seat. Sam Wilson stood behind him. They were all looking upward, toward their video monitor on their stolen quinjet. The others must have been asleep.

“The connection is secure. Good evening, Mr. Rogers.”

“Just Steve. What’s going on?”

T’Challa smiled serenely, but continued as if nothing had been said. “All is fine here right now.”

Wanda, a quiet voice from the side. “Isn’t it 3 in the morning your time?”

“Yes.” T’Challa tapped the cool glass atop his desk. He cleared his throat, looking at nothing. “I have some news. And a simple request.”

Steve looked at his compatriots. “You wouldn’t call if it wasn’t serious, Your Highness.”

Emma raised an eyebrow at Bucky.

T’Challa gestured toward him.

_I’m not going to hear the end of this._

Bucky shoved out of his plush chair and walked around the ancient wooden fixture until he was in the camera’s view.

“First, the news.”

 “Oh, shit!” Sam was the first to react. He bent down and scrunched his face together as he peered into the video connection. Wanda’s head was next to his as she leaned almost out of her chair. Her mouth popped open into a shocked grin. “Aren’t you supposed to be a block of ice?”

Bucky bit back a half-smile. Steve was silent. Bucky could see it in his face: he was waiting for the axe to drop.

“Yes,” said T’Challa. “Yes he is. There was a…variable I didn’t expect to intervene.”

“You probably should have,” Emma whispered. T’Challa nodded once. Tired. Conceding.

“Someone attacked,” Steve deduced. “You need us there.”

“Not quite,” T’Challa quipped.

“Are you all right, Buck?”

Bucky shrugged. “I’ve been worse.”

But he glanced at Emma across the desk. Someone attacked—that someone was Aisling, and it was against herself, for a reason neither Emma nor her would reveal. The dream came just as Emma predicted. But instead of three days, it was one.

When Aisling came out of it, she was near catatonic.

_I didn’t want to I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t I couldn’t move he made me stay I couldn’t say anything I’m so sorry…_

Emma looked into nothing – at the space between herself and everyone else, mouth pinched downward, eyes limp and listless.

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, remembering it.

She had been terse. _If Aisling goes, they’ll just put you back._

_It’s what I chose._

She said nothing to that.

T’Challa spoke calmly and clearly, explaining the situation. Aisling. Bucky could be fixed or he could not be, no one was sure yet, not even Aisling. But she was a problem now. He had thought his scientists had fixed her bizarre dreams and daytime breakdowns, and he had even proposed theories himself, but he was a physicist and a psychologist, not a neurologist nor a magic maker, and these attacks were more than just bad dreams. They were destroying her.

“Wait,” Steve said. “What does this have to do with us?”

“Or with waking that walking time bomb.”

“Hi Sam,” Bucky said.

“Hey man.”

“My theory,” T’Challa said, raising his voice slightly, “will help them both. And it will require the assistance of a certain Scarlet Witch.”

The runaway Avengers looked at one another and then at Wanda, the idea dawning on them. Wanda froze, a deer caught in headlights – a woman praying for invisibility or for strength or perhaps for foresight.

Maybe she knew, Bucky would think later. Maybe she had a suspicion.

The quinjet wouldn’t make it there, first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dun dun DUN  
> say hello to our little frands  
> the other avengers. mostly just cap and sam and wanda because...i dont want to write for ant man or clint lmao. not feelin it.  
> but who knows. will they ever make it to nebraska so i can continue to make fun of my midwestern heritage????


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i rewatched some movies and realized i described the quinjet TOTALLY WRONG BASICALLY so just pretend it is a similar quinjet that T'Challa gave them that is slightly different. sorry.
> 
> basically this is an apology for any other continuity bizarros i pull off besides the fact i invented an alien race for my own enjoyment for the MCU.
> 
> also for tense experimentation  
> DEAL

_“He who extinguishes the gift of the stars_  
_from fellows wandering in step with him_  
 _will see the Ancestors’ tears_  
 _and watch Heaven shatter from his sky._ ”

Translation by Her Holiness the Queen Yunara Ashara Siuvara III, from the Sitorai Verses

\--

4 hours later. 7:00 Standard Wakandan Time.

_Whoosh._ Her door opened and Aisling stood almost on top of the doorway, as if she had been waiting there. Her white, windy sundress softly billowed from the air that rushed into her room, collecting in bunches around the bottom of her white leggings.

“Emma overslept,” she observed. Her head cocked to the side, like a bird. “Did you even sleep?”

He shrugged. _I don’t. It’s overrated. I can’t. It doesn’t matter._ No words seemed to fit, so he said nothing.

For one so willing to stare him in the eye, bald-faced, her sideward glance spoke of…guilt.

“Come in, then. Sit for a minute.” She turned and drifted deeper into her apartment, back into the soft grey light of what seemed to be her bedroom.  “We have much to do today.”

He looked away from that doorway immediately. Bizarre, that propriety was one thing he kept from the 40s. He never saw himself as that polite…for the time. Rules change. Now he’s old-fashioned.

She floated slowly into the other room, out of sight. He doesn’t sit. He’s sleepless and boundless. His eyes wandered about the…she called it her “parlor,” which, if he thought of it, was also strikingly old-fashioned, in a familiar way. The walls were stark white, but nearly every surface was smothered by swatches of wildly colored fabric accompanied with notes – _Mother, last year’s veil ; Emma, her sister’s prom dress_ – or small oil paintings of vast fields (looked carefully unfolded, likely sent from Nebraska), sheets and sheets of music, shelves of paperback novels and a series of ink drawings that looked specifically like...practice.

He found himself drawn toward the wall of ink work. The way the black ink swirled in some, harshly curved in others. The way some lines seemed to march off the page. They were trying to say something. But he had no way of knowing what.

“That’s what I do with my hands,” she said from beside him. He jumped at her sudden presence in the room. She pretended not to notice his assassin-trained alarm (how could she have surprised him? He should have been watching) as she unpinned one of the simpler ones from her wall. A series of black circles and swirls. If he stared at it too long, the words swam in his eyes, pulling him inward. She smiled serenely at it as she handed it to him. “Rune words. My people’s ancient language. This one is a word for…I think ‘shield’ is its closest translation.”

He glared down at it. Perhaps he could straighten out the circles if he focused hard enough. He looked back up to compare. ‘Shield’…or what he could discern as that…was the most common one on her wall.

She spooked him with a laugh and he turned to see her watching him with a raised brow. Her eyes yawned dark like the fading sun, moments before the light disappeared entirely. She looked right through him. He was sure of it. “I’m half-alien, remember.”

“Right,” he muttered. “How could I forget.”

She slipped the paper out of his hands and turned to re-pin it on the wall, but not without a mischievous wink in his direction. It almost annoyed him. He remembered now – he used to be the one to do stuff like that. “Glad you remembered how to speak,” she said. “Today was going to be rather boring otherwise.”

He leaned against the cool edge of a modern fireplace. “Your place is a mess,” he said.

She spun in a circle, once. “I know. It’s grand.”

He smiled. _Grand_. Who spoke like that anymore? “Who needs all this stuff?”

She put one hand on her hip. “How else can I remember all the things that make me happy?”

A showy performance of Aisling, the Alien Lady – he was starting to pick up on it now. Perhaps it was supposed to sound chipper and white-light-bright, like everything else about her, but there was an edge to it. She knew he knew. There was a shared memory of terror between them now.

She pulled on a grey sweater and walked out the door, gesturing for him to follow. He did. He felt like a sad puppy, doing it. He wasn’t really wanted anywhere else in the palace.

He walked beside her the short distance to Emma’s room. And in a moment, he saw her transform back into Aisling, the person. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” she whispered, in front of Emma’s door.

“About what?

“I never wanted you to see…” She waved a hand in front of her face and wiggled her fingers as she crossed her eyes. A silly face to describe night horrors. “I thought they were gone.” She knocked on Emma’s door, three times.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Nightmares don’t care about shields.”

Her face faltered, and her eyes darted away. She pointedly stood at his side, not looking at him. He wanted to punch himself in the face with his metal hand. Bad joke.

But then…she leaned over dramatically.  “Everyone underestimates me,” she stage-whispered.

He didn’t have time to respond before Emma’s door slid open and the bodyguard stumbled out of her room. Aisling brightened immediately. Like she was putting on a veil.

“Sorry,” Emma mumbled.

“Don’t apologize on my account, darling,” Aisling said. “Bucky Barnes may be _this_ close to falling down out of hunger, however.” She put her arm in Emma’s and the three of them continued down the hall, Aisling humming cheerily all the way.

\--

9 a.m. Standard Wakandan Time.

Aisling huffed. She stood up to pace. “You could at least _pretend_ to try. This is why you were supposed to sleep!”

“Sorry.”

“Useless,” she muttered. Bucky bit back a smile. Her anger was almost comical, in the way her fists balled up against her dress, the way she threw her arms about dramatically and threatened to ‘cut all his hair off in the night if he didn’t cooperate.’ But he knew some of it was real – and most of it was at herself.

She wanted this to work so _badly_. He would be moved by it, if he wasn’t still so flabbergasted by it. He wanted it to work. He was scared what it would mean if it did.

But so far all she could access and help him sift through were memories from Wakanda and a sparing few from his time in the 107th. That would have been an accomplishment, if it hadn’t shaken her up so badly she almost cried, seeing his reaction.

Emma stood to the side, smirking. They were in a sunny, empty room that overlooked the landing pad, and her eyes kept darting out the window. Aisling had already snapped at her once for it. _Stop laughing! Who are you blasted waiting for, anyway?_

While things were certainly not chummy between himself and the bodyguard, there was a cordiality. A shared mission, of sorts.

_So we’re all going to go together?_ she’d said after the meeting. It was probably the longest string of words she said to him that wasn’t ‘Go away.’ _That’ll be…a crew._

_I’ll keep my distance,_ he assured her.

“I am going to make you knit something for me if you don’t shape up. Mark my words,” Aisling said, bringing his attention back to her. She sat down in front of him with another dramatic huff.

“It is all my fault,” he said, dry.

“A tea warmer,” Emma said.

“Yes!” Aisling’s voice rang like a bell. “A tea warmer! Get ready, Barnes. I see a lot of those in your future.”

He gazed down at her fists, smooth and small, and then glanced at Emma. They’d talked about this, too. “Now, wait a second,” he said. “I have an idea.”

She raised a brow. “Oh, this ought to be good.”

“I’m supposed to…what gibberish was it?” he said. “Get out of my mind cave?”

She laughed. When he teased her, she became this bizarre conglomeration of her real self and her Presented Self, and he rather liked it, throwing her off. “Is that what you want to call it? Your very scary mind cave?”

“Terrifying.”

She cocked her head. She was trying to read him. “All right.”

He brought his hands carefully in front of himself. “How about I teach you some self-defense? How to swing a punch? You know.” He did a faux punch with his flesh arm.

She caught his punch in the air so gingerly he withered a little inside. “I know how to punch.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not going to punch you to prove it, if that’s what you’re asking.” She was biting her lip, thoughtful. “Anyway. My people don’t believe in violence.”

“So that’s why Emma taught you how to punch.”

Emma laughed out loud at that. _Bucky, 1_.

“Hey!” Aisling gasped, and covered her mouth. “Yes. Leave me alone.”

He watched her for a moment, waiting for her to emerge from her presented self. A long moment passed before she met his gaze.

“I just think it’ll help us both,” he said softly. “I can get out of my head. And a girl like you ought to know how to fight a man.”

Her mouth popped open a little. He expected her to grin devilishly at him for it, for the…error. Laugh at him. _A girl like me! What, you mean pretty? Crazy? How’s a soldier like you supposed to know?_ Instead she just observed him, eyes sparkling, for a few moments too long. “I should,” she said, acquiescing.

He flushed, bright red. He thought his face might catch fire. “I mean, think about it a little bit. I’m not going to go easy on you.”

She watched him carefully, like she was sorting between puzzle pieces. _Assassin. Headstrong boy trapped in the trenches._ He wanted to slip into the floor and disappear with the same vigor he felt planted there, by her gaze. He could stay here a while.

Suddenly she gasped.

“A ship!” She scrambled to her feet without any semblance of her usual, planned grace. “Oh my gosh! We never get visitors on this side of the palace!”

She was already running out the door by the time Bucky regained his bearings. In two steps, he was at the window, beside Emma. He squinted out. A decently-sized ship was indeed coming in to land, the force of it blowing back the rain-heavy trees beside the pad. It looked…vaguely like something Stark would make or perhaps sell, at some point, but…old.

“We forgot to tell her.” Emma cursed under her breath. “She’s going to be _so_ mad. She hates surprises.”

“We didn’t have time,” he said.

He watched the ship. Something was…off. He could feel Emma beside him tense.

“Wait,” she said. “That…doesn’t look like the ship T’Challa gave to Rogers.”

“This is a high security area,” Bucky said.

They looked at each other for a moment.

_No._

\--

Aisling’s face flushed as she ran down the hall. She thanked the Ancestors for the distraction – a ship, of all things! She didn’t recognize it, but that hardly mattered. T’Challa kept her safe here, and visitors were a welcome delight, even if she was never allowed to meet them.  Maybe he’d let her this time. Maybe she could stop thinking about stupid Bucky Barnes.

He had this look about him…this lost, utterly earnest look. A man who didn’t want to see his reflection because he couldn’t find himself in the mirror. She was still trying to forget the face he made when he realized he’d gone back to World War II for a moment – the face of a man watching a kid throw himself into the fire.

She knew that look. She saw it in the mirror, sometimes, too.

_Stop, Aisling. Just move forward._

So she threw herself down the hall, running as fast as her feet could go. Guards started peeking out of rooms alongside white-coated scientists, watching her fly by. Let them think what they will! Watch me go! I am a swan, swooping down onto the water. I am a princess, greeting her public.

Bucky’s voice rang out. _Aisling!_

Breathless, she reached the hangar bay doors and pressed her hand into the access point.

_Aisling_ _Siuvara. Access granted._

Two arms snaked around her middle, hard.

Her whole body froze and her icicle cells convulsed, sickened. _You’re mine._ Instinct kicked in – she swung an elbow back, _Don’t touch me—_

The man took in a soft breath and instantly let her go. She whirled around, eyes blurring. Her heart dropped into the depths of her stomach as she squeezed her shaking hands together.

“Bucky! Don't scare me like that.”

“You didn’t hit me that hard,” he muttered, waving her off as he took a moment to breathe.

Emma ran up beside him, breathing hard. “Jesus Christ, Ash!” She didn’t waste another moment. She seized Aisling by the wrist. “We have to go.”

Aisling pulled away from her.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said quietly. In the corner of her eye, she saw commotion building. T’Challa, flanked by a couple members of the Dora Milaje, was approaching the hangar from the left, while she and her compatriots had emerged from the right. He did not look pleased.

The ship’s door came down, down, down.

“They’re going on lockdown, Ash,” Emma said. “We need to go inside.”

_Lockdown?_

She turned toward the ship – an ugly brown color, like wet sand, with an unusually boxy shape. She took in a breath and reached out her mind toward the ship. Who was there? Who was waiting so long to come out? She sought life signs, a spark of life, but the ship…was it blocking her way?

T’Challa was coming toward her, face ashen. She could hear shouting. _Who gave them pass codes? This isn’t the ship we were expecting._

“Emma, please get her inside,” she heard him say. But it would be too late.

She saw them – three men…no, five men. Ten? Walking down the ramp. They looked of all different creeds, except they wore the same, frighteningly crisp clothes covered by bulletproof vests, and were gaunt as cows during drought. They walked down the ramp in a formation, like they were trained for this, and she realized with a shock they were all staring at her, eyes utterly black – Sitorai whose glamours were breaking down…

Their eyes were blank. Their faces showed nothing. She felt nothing from them.

_Literally._

A nothing that _breathed_. It sucked at her mind, a vacuum where light and history and feeling should have been. Souls broken so thoroughly they’d been ground into dust – utterly gone.

_Icicle cells. Frozen into nothing. You’ll never move again. He found you._

_He_ found _you._

Nearby guards fell to their knees, screaming.

The air crackled with their fear. Artificial fear, forced out of the mind, extracted like pus. The guards held their heads and cried out, trapped in sudden nightmares.

She forced her cells of ice to shatter. She turned – T’Challa was crouching, ready to pounce. Emma was scrambling toward her, Bucky’s metal arm was rising in front of his face, eyes up to the sky. Someone else was landing. She could hear another ship thrum into existence. But then Bucky looked at her, questioning, _why_ —

And she came alive as he fell to the ground.

\--

It all happens at once.

The actual quinjet is not even settled on the ground before Steve jumps down from the ship’s center, an old, oblique shield at the ready. Bucky remembers, all too viscerally, the way he dropped his original, a perfect circle, at Tony Stark’s feet…

_I killed his father. I killed his mother._

The Falcon flies after Steve, a flash of red and metal, guns ready. _Come and get it, freaks!_ Guards are falling to their knees, screaming, but not a single shot has been fired. Wanda, the girl with the wild long hair, hands tinged with red, comes not long after, but her face speaks of the same fear that cripples the guards – she can sense it, its unholy, unnatural way—

And then, Bucky feels it, scratching at his mind. _Falling down, away away away from Steve, into the cold nothing, toward white-clothed men and their dark gloved hands holding screws and syringes—_  

Emma, beside him, falls to the ground. She does not scream. She holds it in. She looks like she’s drowning in it. He’s falling too, to his knees—

But then he feels Aisling’s small arms wrap around his middle. She shouts his name and pulls him backward, groan-shouting at the effort. She snakes one arm away and reaches out to Emma. “Come on! Get up!” she screams.

“Go!” Emma waves at her, still fighting the fear stupor. She shouts through gritted teeth. “I’ll…I’ll find you!”

“No!” Aisling drags Bucky back and reaches out to Emma still, but Emma waves her on and reaches for a knife, hidden in her boot.

“Bucky!”

Steve is shouting for him. He slams a man-creature with his shield, and then another, shoving his way forward. T’Challa has long since sprung into action, tearing through fear like tissue paper. There is too much riding on him to lose himself to it. He is all focus. All control.

Even as the creature-men start shooting.

It snaps Bucky into a moment of clarity. Steve shouting, the gunshots. Emma, standing to fight, bellowing out some kind of warcry as one of the Dora Milaje throws her a gun. Wanda, running toward him, eyes ablaze with power and fear. Aisling’s small, unthinkingly brave body trying to drag him away from the danger. His whole body thrums. He has a job to do here.

He struggles to his feet, even as the fear miasma fights to keep him down. Aisling almost falls when she realizes he is moving and he turns to steady her, wrapping his metal arm around her middle as carefully as he can. Wanda reaches him just as they are both steady and standing, covering them in a crackling, unstable shield. Her face contorts with the effort.

“We have to go!” Wanda shouts.

Aisling grabs both the woman’s wrist and his other arm.

“This way!” Aisling says.

“Buck!” It’s Steve. And Bucky turns to see him, fighting and thrashing against the creatures even as he falls to his own knees. He waves out, toward the far door. “Go! Keep them safe!”

Bucky’s had enough fear, enough loathing for 10 lives. He knows he should stay here and help. _Not without you!_

But the men around him fall, one by one, and it dawns on Bucky like a dull bruise blooming on his arm, like it does every time he sees Steve, like it probably will for the rest of time, that Steve isn’t the one that needs protecting anymore.

He turns and follows Aisling down the hall.

\--

Aisling scrambled through the crowd, pushing past shouting guards and skittish scientists, shoving around them, willing them not to see her or her friends.

She ran as fast as she could, until her heart beat so fast her throat burned with each pulse. The mysterious woman with beautiful, long hair and a shock-red hoodie helped her guide Bucky down the hall. Even crippled by the odd miasma, he was still faster than most men on a good day.

The woman’s face sparked some familiarity in Aisling that she couldn’t place for a few long moments. She wore her shockingly red hoodie over a grey dress and black leggings – clothes easy to move and run in. Her gloved hands twitched with red-hued power.

And then she recalled. She was one of the Avengers. Wanda Maximoff.

Aisling wanted to greet the woman, but there was no time. She directed the rag-tag group toward a far set of large, metal doors, blessedly free of obstruction, and she pushed her hand to the access point—

_Aisling Siuvara. We are currently on lockdown, please proceed…_

“Override!” she shouted at the door.

_Please compute override code, Lady Siuvara._

“Open! Code: By all the Aspects!”

_Access granted._

The metal doors hissed open and Bucky pushed through.

“Stay behind me,” he said.

She thought of her father. Is this how he felt, in the days when he went to war? Her father, Isamu Oshiro. Air Force pilot turned farmer. A man of honor. A man who sat her down next to him in his tractor and told her the names of everything she’d ask about. _What’s that cloud’s name? And that plant? And that plant?_ And he’d never run out of names. He made them up until she ran out of questions and was content to lie against his arm as he drove.

He never spoke of his Air Force life, except for when he took her up in his own, small plane. And even then, only about what it meant to fly.

_Give me your wisdom, Dad._

Ships upon ships awaited in the hangar, sitting silent and serene. On the other side, great glass doors opened up over a cliff, to the open, wide world. The lockdown had worked.

But the creature-men were there, single minded in their desire to find a way in.

Their gunshots rattled against the glass, causing Aisling to jump. Some of them were crouched down, as if trying to dig in under the door.

Her adrenaline-spiked heart thudded hard against her ribs. She ran to the closest ship, obliquely denying Bucky’s request that she stay behind him, and skidded in front of its loading dock. She reached for the access computer.

“Over here!” Aisling shouted. She turned toward the computer. “Aisling Siuvara, requesting ship access.”

_Access denied._

“Get down!” A flash of metal. And suddenly Bucky was there, kneeling over her.

An explosion shook the earth.

She screamed. _No!_ She stumbled to the ground and felt pain shoot up her knees. Her arms still clung to the landing pad computer and she held on tight as the ringing in her ears lashed out, blocking all thought.

Bucky looked down at her for a moment, fear rolling off of his body, but he was unmoved by the explosion. His hair flew about his face like a wild mane.

The creature-men. They had somehow exploded open the doors.

She reached for Bucky’s shoulder. It was inexplicable, even to herself, why she did this. _Don’t do it. Don’t go fight them. Just give me another minute and you won’t have to risk them hurting you._ Because she knew he would. The man who stood at her door.

“Get that ship ready!” Bucky said, his face close.

And then he threw himself at the coming men, before she could move. She opened her mouth to shout, but Wanda’s hands gently pushed on Aisling’s shoulders, encouraging her to stand. “Focus!”

Aisling nodded. Through gritted teeth she crawled up and slammed a hand on the landing pad computer.

“Override. Code: T’Chaka, King and Ancestor.”

_Access denied._

She glanced over at Bucky. He was…another person, then. So gracefully he moved through their ranks, capacitating them with a flurry of kicks and punches with his metal arm. One of them pulled a gun on him, and the panic keened to a high-pitched screech in her brain. Would she truly watch him die, here and now? Why did she ever think to let him free? He could have been blissfully unaware, asleep to all the world, except for her selfishness.

But she watched Bucky seize that man’s neck, and then a _snap_ and a clatter of the fallen gun echoed off the walls.

She felt plunged into cold water. The wrongness settled in her bones. She was witnessing taboo.

_He can kill so easily._

“Override. Code: Aisling, Lady of the Sitorai.”

_Access denied._

She screamed in frustration and slammed a hand on the computer. Wanda glanced between her and the ship door and reached up for the door, but her arm shook and her eyes winced, and she was fighting her own mental block so fiercely Aisling could almost see it in her own mind.

_Wanda’s eyes swivel, hands twitching. She’s back in solitary, restrainer bolt on her neck, straitjacket squishing her limbs together, she feels deeply unsafe – just don’t use your power, and it’ll be fine._

Wanda’s thoughts were tinged with a toxin of fear, a cocktail of the creature-men’s manufactured stuff and her own. There was an unusual beauty and crispness to the way her mind spun, a lovely twist as red as dawn. Aisling hadn’t seen another’s mind with such bright complexity since she’d been home.

But there was no time to explore that notion just yet. Without the right access codes, the ship wouldn’t even take off, even if they forced the door open. _He was coming_ , she could feel it, in the back of her brain, and not even Bucky would be able to keep him at bay…

That’s it.

_T’Challa prepared for everything._

“Override. Code: Tamryn Sychalle.”

The computer paused, as if thinking or scanning. Then.

_Access granted._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also sorry this is the longest chapter ever  
> just sorry all around!!!! this is pretty self-indulgent i realize so if you are still reading w/me thanks. i hope u continue to read and maybe even enjoy!


	5. Chapter 5

It sounded like the world was screaming. The Light, shattering, from the abominations. From the death and the fear.

Aisling scrambled up the ship’s ramp, holding her hands over her ears. But it was useless. The only recourse was to fly the ship away.

She ducked through the small cargo bay and half-tripped over various cords into the pilot’s chair. She scanned the controls and sought to remember what she’d learned while sneaking around the Wakandan files. A quinjet of some sort, one of the newer models with the expanded cargo sections, but she wasn’t sure this thing had anything in the way of weaponry fully installed yet…

She gulped down air at the thought. She would not be shooting anyone.

Moments after she settled in the pilot’s seat, Wanda’s voice rang through the cockpit.

“We have to go! Now!”

Aisling turned back toward the voice. Wanda was dragging Bucky up into the ship. He was upright but holding a hand to his side, blood seeping between his fingers and down his arm in tight rivulets. Wanda slammed a button with her gloved fist and the door hissed shut.

Aisling’s brain felt stuck on a single, high-pitch frequency. “We have to wait for the others!” Aisling shouted.

“We don’t have time!” Wanda shouted back, settling Bucky into one of the co-pilot seats. “Do you know how to fly this thing?”

Aisling’s hands hovered over the controls. _I can do this. I can do this._

She placed a hand on one of the interfaces. “Ship, initiate startup sequence.”

The ship vibrated as the engines roared to life. Hope sparked in her rib cage.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Aisling muttered. Wanda and Bucky looked at her with alarm, but Aisling pretended not to notice. The world was screaming and Bucky was bleeding and Wanda’s panic was so clear Aisling could taste it, bitter as alcohol on the back of her throat. In a blur, a blessing from her father, she prepped the ship for flight as gunshots rang out against the hull.

She seized the controls with singular focus. _They will not take us today._ And then she punched the ignition, straight toward the men and the giant hole in the glass bay door.

In seconds, only nothingness hung between them and the forests of Wakanda.

\--

Aisling gripped the controls so hard her shoulders cried out like cracking stone. _Take deep breaths. One. Two. Three._ The world felt too bright as they sliced through the clouds. Auras glowed at the edge of her vision and her head throbbed.

She set a course due west – they all agreed that their only option was to leave and regroup elsewhere – and hovered over the controls for a few more minutes before Wanda carefully stood and grasped Aisling’s shoulders. Aisling jumped at the touch.

“It’s okay,” Wanda said. “I think we’re safe now.”

Aisling set it into autopilot. But she clung to the control sticks, even though they were locked in place. The Light was rebelling around her, keening and screaming and sputtering with high-strung emotion. Before long, everything would look like it was melting…

“That was some crack piloting,” Bucky said.

Aisling glanced at him and then back out the cockpit window, thoughts whirring too quickly for laughter. “It was mostly luck. How did they get here?” she asked, voice rough as coal. “What happened?”

“They followed us,” Wanda said. Her hand was over her eyes, rubbing her temples. “We thought we’d lost them. No recognizable pilot signatures or anything.”

“Wait,” Aisling said. She felt like she was sorting through cement. “Where did you come from?”

Wanda sat up a little straighter. She looked at Bucky, who was crumpled in his seat, pushing cloths from a first aid kit against his side. “You mean you didn’t tell her?” Wanda asked.

“There was no time.”

“Tell me what?”

Bucky stared at his wound, eyes cast downward, sweat beading across his pale brow. Worry for him sparkled anew in her gut. But this was never a good sign – people not telling her things. Her fingers clenched even harder around the controls.

“T’Challa sent for Steve and the others. To get us out.”

“No one told me that.”

“It was decided last night, when you were asleep.”

It started crawling on her skin…the exact feeling she had three years ago, when her mother sat her down to talk. _We are sending you to Wakanda._ The special use of the ‘We’ pronoun, so no one person could be the brunt of her blame, of her fiery, broken pride. The Light spun as nameless anxiety crackled awake. Her very existence, a problem to be solved.

“Why?” she said. “I’m fine. You’re fine.”

Bucky seemed to sense he was treading close to a mine field. He looked on at nothing for a moment, as if gathering strength from it, before turning his eyes on her. “Are we?”

There it was. She felt plunged into cold water. Air whooshed past her ears. Their voices sounded muddled and tinny.

“Oh no.”

“Aisling…”

“This is happening _again_.”

Wanda sensed impending conflict, and hovered by the cockpit doorway – for easy escape if need be, it looked like. “What? What’s happening?”

“You were just going to surprise me with this information? Good morning, and also its time to pack up your life _again_ ,” She grips the steering contraption so hard her arms ache. Venom froths at her words. “Good try at doing something useful. Very cute, Aisling. Very adorable.”

“This isn’t about you,” Bucky said through his teeth.

“Isn’t it though? My dreams? My penchant to start _seeing things_?”

He stared out the window, wordless, which only piqued her anger higher.

“God, and Emma was looking for you all the whole time. That’s why she was staring out the window.” She can feel the tears coming. “Because I’m too crazy to make any of my own decisions. Because I don’t get a say in where I’m sent or what I do or _anything_!” She slams the control panel. “Damn it!”

For a long moment, he said nothing. Perhaps he thought saying nothing would cool her anger – a very wrong assumption. Or perhaps he thought there would be nothing he _could_ do to stem her anger. But then he took a deep breath. “You know that’s not why. You _know_ it.”

“Do you think I’m _stupid_?” She rubbed angrily at her eyes. “That’s how it has always been, and it hasn’t changed since I’ve been born. I’m 24 god-forsaken years old! The answers are _still_ the same.”

Something changed in his expression then. A light coming on inside. A bizarre understanding, but from the other side of the mirror – she can feel it, in the way his emotions scatter and realign.

 “Aisling, I’m sorry. That’s not—we weren’t…” He put his bloody flesh hand on his face. He was sputtering.  “We were worried about you—we just wanted to—we didn’t expect to get _attacked_ …”

He laid his forehead thoroughly in his hand and abruptly stopped talking. Perhaps he knew it was useless at this point. She stared down at the steering mechanism, working hard to keep her tears inside.

“You aren’t the only one everyone wants to keep locked up or have killed. Okay? I get it.”

Aisling felt like he’d just punched her in the stomach. Wanda stepped up and cleared her throat.

“Cool it, both of you,” she said, voice flat. “I was supposed to be the one to help you. And I don’t even know if I can.” She was a fire burning under an even keel. “But here we are. So we might as well stick together and figure it out.”

Aisling’s thoughts spun as the events of the past hour slowly sunk in. Where is Emma now? T’Challa? Were they all right?

Wanda sighed, frustrated. Perhaps she took their silence as only tepid acceptance. “We need a plan. Where are we going to go?”

Aisling took in a deep breath and closed her eyes before responding. “This ship isn’t meant to circle the globe. We can make it to the U.S. East Coast. Maybe.”

Wanda leaned on her elbows, propped up on the back of Aisling’s chair. She hummed thoughtfully. “There might be some safe houses out there, but it’s also close to a lot of the people who want to track us down.”

“Aisling might be an advantage,” Bucky said. “No one’s looking for her.”

“But that’s not true, either,” Wanda said. “Who’s Tamryn?”

The hair stood up on the back of Aisling’s neck. She forgot Wanda could see thoughts, much like her own people, besides the fact that she had been there to witness the key word that had saved their lives. But it was a cache of thoughts Aisling wasn’t eager to open – it clawed at her, relentless as tar.

“He’s why I’m in Wakanda. Partly.”

“And you think he sent those men?” Wanda said, quietly, parsing through the facts.

Aisling squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, blocking a sudden memory. “I don’t…know. I’ve never known him capable of such a thing but it…” She blinked hard, cleansing herself of the thought of him. “It _felt_ like him.”

Wanda stared out the cockpit window for a long moment before she sighed and tilted her head down. She thankfully seemed to sense that they were pressing up against a glass door in Aisling’s head, sealed shut, cold as stone.

“Why did he follow us? Steve and us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what do we know?” Bucky looked up briefly from administering his first aid. “Did you all have any resources set up out there? Is…is Stark…” He clears his throat. “Would he help us?”

“He might,” Wanda said, though she didn’t hide the annoyance in her voice. “But he’s probably under heavy surveillance right now.”

“We need to get a word to Steve,” Bucky said. He moved toward the com board. “They need to know we made it out.”

“Oh no.” Wanda lunged and put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Until we figure out how those men tracked us in _stealth mode_ , I don’t want to send any messages just yet.”

Aisling looked down at her shaking hands.

It was itching at her. They needed to go to Nebraska. She had to warn her people.

She’d been dreaming of the day she could return since she left. Of the verdant green, the fields waving gently in the wind, saying goodbye. The people who knew her. The people who were supposed to love her.

But now, when she thought of it, she felt hollow.

\--

After Aisling set course for West Virginia—as far as the ship could go without a refueling—she settled hard into her chair, releasing the controls once and for all. Wanda had meandered toward the back of the ship to take stock of what materials they had access to, if any. Bucky sat in the co-pilot seat, ripping at his long-sleeve, blue henley to handle another wound on his arm.

She turned immediately to help him. Her mother’s words rang in her head as clear as if the woman was standing there.

_If you choose your pride over your loving heart, it will suck the life out of you._

Or, more crudely: _Be less like your father for a moment, would you?_

Her fingers brushed the edge of his arm. He started at her touch.

“I’ve got it,” he said, softly. He felt guilty. It simmered around him, clinging like mud.

“No you don’t,” she said. The words came out too fast. _Noyoudont._ “You’re destroying your shirt.”

He grabbed her hand with his gloved metal one. The absence of warmth from him felt wholly unreal, even though the pulse in her body seemed to burn a little brighter.

But then he acquiesced and turned away. She grabbed a long cloth and some first aid antibiotics from a nearby medkit and started cleaning his wound.

She thought about what she knew as she did the work. T’Challa must have had some sense that Tamryn was causing trouble, however it was he got here. The code he’d set up, sending for the runaway Avengers…Wakanda was one of the safest places in the world for her. Sending her with runaways wouldn’t make any sense.

Maybe he thought she’d do well with the Avengers. They were used to dealing with…unknowns. She tried to be optimistic about it. But she felt like a burden to be passed around, which annoyed her so much she fought the primal, human urge to punch something

“Are you still mad?” he said, grunting a little.

She blinked. She realized she’d been pulling at his arm a little too hard.

“Well I’m not _happy_ ,” she said, though she was biting back a small smile at her mistake. “But I’m sorry, too. I woke you up and dragged you into this mess. Without me, you would have been sleeping soundly.”

He tilted his head, akin to a shrug, unreadable as ever.

“We’ll get through this all together,” she said. “Trust me.”

He looked at her for a long moment, a moment that stretched farther than it should have. It was improper and impolite. She fidgeted under his gaze and bored her eyes into his arm, into the blood and the work.

Where did he go, in those tempest blue eyes? She was reminded of a lullaby, for she knew the man did not sleep. She felt his energy pace by her door at night, on the way to get some air or a drink or both. She wasn’t the only one who shouted at night. She heard him scream once, so short and so clear she was sure she had imagined it, until he came to her the next morning with heavy-lidded eyes, weighed down by shadows of a thousand sorts.

She’d been afraid to ask him then, if he was all right.

Had he ever known a calm evening? She thought of soft nights under constellations and the warmth of grass that held on even as the sun sank behind the horizon. She thought of her mother, humming as she worked at her desk, and of her father, carrying her up a spiral staircase, half-lidded with child sleep. She remembered, unbidden, an old Sitorai song that her mother would sing to her as the sun would set, in the soft language of her people – a song in its own way. She considered the rough translation.

_Beautiful light_   
_There it goes, rickety_   
_gone with the night_   
_every child, sleeping bright_

Bucky’s hand – the still metal, suddenly flush with warmth – touched her shoulder, as if to steady her. She took in a breath and looked up. He was watching her with shocked, shiny eyes, mouth open slightly. Energy crackled around them. Aisling felt like she was falling, down and down, but her heart was flying up, into the sky and the sun and the stars.

“What’s that?” he asked, gruff and mottled, like he hadn’t spoken for days. “What’s the language?”

She had been singing, she realized. In her people’s language.

Wanda’s aura was instantly, suddenly close. Bucky’s hand fell from her shoulder immediately as Wanda gracefully stepped into the cockpit.

“You are an enhanced, aren’t you?” Wanda asked.

An enhanced. Aisling bit her lip. _What would be the opposite of an enhanced?_ she thought with considerable sarcasm.

She felt drained all of a sudden.

“Your singing,” Wanda said, for clarification. “I…could almost see it. In my own head. Some other place…”

“It’s just a song,” Aisling said. She ignored the zip of energy up her spine. “As good or as powerful as any other.”

Bucky was quiet as Wanda scanned Aisling with the mercilessness of a computer. Her face burned. Aisling hid the hope in her heart, that it could be a sign – she’d lived her life looking for such a thing. But her people lived by the song, and it was silly to think it could be anything more than years of practice at work.

“Why was T’Challa hiding you?” Wanda asked, eyes hard. She was trained to eliminate threats, and she was examining a potential one now. A chill settled on Aisling’s skin – everything, cold and hot at once.

She tilted her head to the side slightly. “He didn’t tell you?”

Wanda leaned against the doorway, unyielding.

Aisling rubbed her face with both hands, chasing away the exhaustion that suddenly pulled her taut. “He didn’t even tell you the good part? That I’m only half human?”

A snort of amusement from Bucky.

“You know,” he said, and she swore a smile was creeping in on his dour expression, “that’s not much of an explanation.”

“You certainly look like a human,” Wanda said. Her doubt was clear, though tempered by confusion – Aisling knew the woman sensed more than she could comprehend.

She looked out the window. Toward the rolling clouds. “It’s a good trick, isn’t it?” She glanced at Wanda. “Almost like magic.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Wanda said. Her tone was jocular, but her eyes were widening. “I would know.”

“You would know,” Aisling agreed quietly. “I can see it in the air around you. A power that crackles. Unnaturally given. Bright…but you teeter on the edge of fearing it again.”

Wanda’s eyes flashed.

“You’re a mind reader.”

“No,” Aisling said quickly. “Oh no. My people are. But I’m not like them.” She smiled down at her lap, looking over the tip of her nose. “I’m a diluted version of everything they are. I don’t see more than bits and pieces.”

Something keened in the woman’s spirit– a yearning to know, to _be_. So forward and fiery, a fighter, compared to the weary soul of the hundred-year-old soldier next to her. He sat still, eyes vacant, as if re-running the last few moments in his head.

“Who are your people?” Wanda asked.

“The Sitorai,” Aisling said, voice full of artificial wonder. “The People of the Thousand Stars.” She smiled at the name. “We live in Nebraska now.”

Wanda leaned closer to her, as if she could absorb more information simply by being closer. A smile teased her hard mouth. “ _Nebraska_?”

Aisling smiled wickedly. “No one will ever find us there.”

Bucky laughed a little at that. So he _was_ listening. “Can’t think of a reason anyone would _want_ to go there,” he said. She slipped a hand over her mouth to hide her smile and tried hard not to be spooked at how hard her heart thudded at his laugh.

“That’s a little odd, isn’t it?” Wanda said, arms crossing over her chest.

After a moment, Aisling raised her hands, palms to the sky. Uncertainty. “I don’t know _where_ we came from. Mother doesn’t talk about it. Her texts are pretty purposefully vague about it. But wherever it was…” She thought of her small town, the Strawberry Festival, the singing, the constant singing…she looked out the window, into the eternal twilight as they chased the sun. “There’s not many of us left.”

Wanda looked at Bucky, as if expecting him to step in with concern, but he pointedly said nothing. He simply watched.

“And no one knows about your people at _all_?” Wanda asked.

Aisling side-eyed her. “We live peacefully among our darling fellows, the humans, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m proof of that.”

She could see the gears working in Wanda’s head, her put-on airs collapsing fast. She was tired and curious and young and hopeful – a warrior’s heart, a young girl’s soul.

“Why?” Wanda asked, soft. “Why not tell the world?”

It was a good question. A hard question. The same that every young Sitorai asked, and every young human in the town of Lomora…she thought the answer false, then, but knowing the world as she did, it felt horrifically, sadly true.

“People don’t like it,” Aisling said simply. “The Sokovia Accords may have taught you a thing or two about that.”

Both of them tensed at the mention of it.

“We wouldn’t survive anything like that,” Aisling continued, matter-of-fact. “We want to help others. Guide others. Wherever we came from, that’s always what we did.” She smiled, thinking of how her mother would phrase it. “There is no darkness that is impenetrable. Viciously care for those around us, so they would let us live in peace.”

Bucky made a sound, a mix between a scoff and a snort, though his voice was not cruel. “So they wouldn’t kill you.”

“You can _read minds_ ,” Wanda intoned, as if she knew too well. “You can’t just live in anonymity forever.”

Aisling leaned back slightly in recoil from the power of their questions. The energy in the room crackled with too much possibility, and it made her…sad. “You’d be surprised how many people seek a healing word, and are willing to protect you after that.” She smiled, distant. “Particularly Midwesterners. There’s no more insular people in the world.”

“But you have to be careful, don’t you?” Wanda said. “How is that fair, that there’s so many of you who have so much power?”

Pride roared to life in her. “You tell me, Avenger. How _is_ it fair?”

The woman fell instantly silent. She looked away. Wild uncertainty battled with curiosity, apology and fear.

“It isn’t. We know that,” Aisling said, pride and memory constricting her words, the odd sadness settling on her like a dark veil. “For…the rest of my people…sharing thoughts comes as easily as breathing. But try to do that to a human and it’s like…making them hallucinate. Like a terrible, awful acid trip – more vivid than any drug out there. That’s why there are very strict rules in place. Part of our Way. Just as our limitations on violence of any kind.”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed. She could feel the raw beginnings of understanding take hold in him, and it scared her.

“You can’t, though,” he said. “You would have done that to me by now.”

She smiled weakly. “No. And you’re right. I would have. You’re the worst and I’m terrible.”

A smile flickered across his face. Perhaps he picked up on it, the curiosity that lingered under her explanation. Here is what my people can do. Here is who they are. Here is who I never will be, even as I claim to be one of them.

But he was an old soldier boy. He knew more than that.

“And it just works? No one ever breaks those rules,” he said. “Ever?”

Aisling swallowed.

“There’s only ever been one recorded incident,” she said, voice suddenly small.

Wanda suddenly took in a sharp breath, her hardness and her put-on airs shimmering away all at once. A moment passed. She clenched Aisling’s seat. Another. She put a hand to her mouth, closing her eyes tight – and that’s when Aisling realized Wanda was seeing it, was seeing her memories, the flashes leaking through now, and Aisling wanted to scream and scramble away, push them all out and away from her, but she was too tired to move her body and so she sat and squeezed her eyes shut against the constant cloud-light lingering outside their ship, and ignored the tears springing up against her will.

“It’s him,” Wanda breathed. “Tamryn. My god. I’m so….”

Wanda closed her mouth. Aisling didn’t want pity – her pride reared up and snapped back. Bucky was sitting up more intently now, glancing between the two women. She could see his mind whirring.

Another long moment passed, like he didn’t want to believe it. “He hurt you.”

She could barely speak. She nodded.

“Is he…why you have nightmares?”

_It feels like he’s stabbing me in the eyes, even though we’re just kissing – I didn’t want to, but it was the only way to make him_ go away _. But suddenly he’s using his gift and he’s digging around in my skull, scooping me out. You’re an anomaly, we’ll be anomalies together, he always said, but I’m beginning to realize he doesn’t mean me. He means the pretty, dumb bauble he wishes I was._

“He was an anomaly,” was all she could manage.

Bucky’s face spoke of anguish, of rage, of words that he couldn’t stop even though he knew she couldn’t answer. “But your people didn’t stop him?” he asked, voice rough.

She breathed in deep.

No. They didn’t.

“At what point is someone not worth saving?” she asked him instead. She looked at him, straight in the eye, and she challenged him to answer it. Did he know the answer, living as he did? He must have had an inkling. He had chosen sleep instead of…living through it. And his closest, perhaps only, friend had let him go. What did it mean? “At what point is someone too evil, too far-gone, to be saved?”

But he bit his quivering lip and said nothing, nothing at all, and looked away. He was thinking of Steve. She knew he was. His spirit screamed with youth whenever he did, an aria of longing and wistfulness and loss that speared her to her seat.

“There’s not supposed to be a point,” she finished, voice shaking. _No darkness is impenetrable._ “So they tried. And tried. And tried.”

“Until your mother sent you away,” Wanda said. “To keep you safe from him.”

“Yes,” Aisling said. She felt in a daze. Her mother, holding her close, chest heaving with sobs. _I can’t stop them. This is the only way, my beloved. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry_. But there’s more to this, Mother, there’s more – they all want this and _I don’t understand_. “But he wasn’t the only one they were afraid of.”

She took off the small, gold chain necklace from around her neck, and watched as their faces opened up. Her skin turned from brown to dark gold, speckled and splattered with pinpointed, subtle lights. Stars on a canvas, smothered by her humanness. She maintained a humanoid form – two arms, two legs, one head, a long torso – but her hair changed from wild and curly to almost translucent. Energy that swirled into an onyx nebula atop her head, crackling, unstable. Her nose flattened somewhat as freckled lights sparkled across her cheeks. Only her eyes and lips remained unchanged – dark brown and doe-like.

The Light sprung into being – now even they noticed it, flickering around her, a symphony of color and thought and memory, caught in the space between what a human could see and what they could feel. Their eyes went out of focus—she was the flux of an explosion, the moment as fire took hold but just before it shattered, forcing everyone to hold their breath, waiting—

She let them see it for exactly 3 seconds. And then she returned to her glamor – back to a simple, pretty girl, whose tears were gone.

“I was supposed to die when I was born,” she said, “and no one knows what it means that I did not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry that these chapters keep getting progressively LONGER but there was a lot of exposition that was earned at this point...at least, that was my opinion, as the author, and I cut down on A LOT OF IT. If you have questions about the Sitorai, send me an ask on ye old tumblr, witchfall.tumblr.com or comment here. Happy to answer (and really to talk to you about anything tbh) but a lot will be explained over the course of the thing.
> 
> I'll note their philosophy is intended to be controversial, so if you are mad about it, GOOD.
> 
> also get ready for some wanda/bucky/aisling SASS. Honestly i'll be surprised if the ship doesn't explode because of it. anyway byeee


	6. Chapter 6

They enter in ragged succession:

T’Challa, still wearing the raiment of the Black Panther, minus the helm; Emma, shirt bloodied from a broken nose (again), eyes dead; Steve, moving with a purpose, anxiously pacing;  Sam, a counterbalance to the Cap, walking in measured steps, arms crossed, brows knit, thinking hard. Clint had long been dropped off elsewhere, likely to find his family and the absent Romanov, and Scott was holed up somewhere by the Pimms. All accounted for.

Except.

A woman appears on the screen, dressed in a simple tunic-like bedshirt, hair wrapped in a plain white cloth. Her face is carefully arranged, perfect as an oil painting in its forced serenity. But when she lays eyes on Emma, a tick of relief causes her fire amber eyes to soften. She leans toward the camera, suddenly and oddly…human.

“Sweet Emma. It’s morning there, if I recall?”

Emma stutters out an ‘Um’ and nods, tears filling her eyes. But her mouth hardens, and her face does not quiver.

“Are you all right, my dear? What’s happened?”

Emma looks at T’Challa, and then looks back at the screen.

“My lady,” she says, voice cracking. “We have a problem.”

\--

The Sitorai.

People of the Thousand Stars.

Wanda walks away, muttering some excuse about needing to catch some shut-eye after flying to Wakanda all night, but she walks away with those words rolling about in her eyes.

Bucky just sits there, wrapped wounds pressing into his skin. He openly stares at Aisling. He is imagining the two together, the girl with stars in her hair and this one, the woman with circles under her eyes. She is somehow both. He feels that in his own heart, sort of. Like his life is lived in two halves.

He thinks of Steve, who gave up everything so he could be sitting here, in a cockpit, next to an alien woman. He smirks at that. Would he be jealous? Relieved it wasn’t him? Unfazed, like he tends to be these days?

_And they tried. And they tried. And they tried._

Bile scratches at the back of his throat.

Suddenly, he realizes he’s been staring too long because he is staring right into her eyes. She glares at him. “Don’t you need to sleep, too?”

He startles into a small smile and diverts his gaze, feeling that old warmth creep back up his cheeks. “You don’t look so bad for an alien,” he says. He has no idea where this even came from, but it’s out of his mouth before he can stop it, so he goes with it. “Almost pretty.”

She raises an eyebrow at him and grins. _Oh boy, here it comes._ “And you’re almost handsome for a 100 year old man.”

“Ha ha.”

He rubs his chin and tries not to think about the way she looked at him when he finally shaved ( _You have a face! It’s rather…well-built_ , she said, in that odd way of hers) or the way she teased him about his hair, which he still does not have the heart or energy to cut.

He sighs instead. “Guess I better watch it, with that temper of yours.”

Her boot toes kick against the floor and she smiles, triumphant. “Sadly for you, I take after my father’s side.”

He places his metal elbow against the arm rest and gingerly lays his head in his hand. He watches out the window . A bizarrely serene sight – stars twinkling in a purple velvet. “He must have been something,” he says. “Raising a hellion like you.”

“He was,” she says, blithely ignoring his taunt. Her head tilts in her chair, resting against the side of the headrest. “He was a military man. Air Force. I think he would have liked you Avengers.” Her fingers twist together in her lap. “He believed in doing the right thing, no matter what it took.”

 _You Avengers._ He doesn’t consider himself such a thing, but he’s too tired to correct her.

“How did he get wrapped up in the alien thing?” he asks instead.

Aisling turns her head back and smiles softly at him. “He’d taken over an old farm in Lomora. My mother found him to be very handsome.” She presses her lips together for a moment and her eyes drift downward, away. “And…good. A noble, quiet man who wanted nothing more than to live by his land and fly his small planes for the rest of his life.”

Bucky smiles distantly. Such a life is lived in only dreams –no ills, nothing following him but time, nothing to worry about but the weather.

She laughs under her breath. “Oh the way my mother tells it, it’s like she was courting the Darkness itself when she told the council she was going to marry him. But no one tells my mother ‘no.’” Her voice fills with pride. “It’s not like she didn’t already know every single eligible Sitorai bachelor…she knew. And he was better than all of them.”

Bucky tries to think of his father, but the memories are buried deep, drowned by the boy he was during the World War. Whatever he can find in his head – a name, George— scatters away as she stares him down.

“What happened to him?” he asks quietly.

Her mouth pinches to the side. “Cancer. It was…horrible. I was 17.”

He nods slowly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She scoffs. “That _is_ the bizarrely appropriate thing to say, isn’t it? To take it on as if it was your fault.” But she smiles at him generously. “But he would appreciate the thought.”

The way her eyes linger on him, he knows a question is coming. He braces himself. He stares back.

“What will you do when we land?” she asks. She was nonchalant, pointedly turning to look at her kicking feet, but he noticed her hand tighten around the arm rest for a moment. He relaxes a little, though he questions her wording.

“Well, we’ll have to find safety. Not a problem in traveler’s towns, but we’ll need to be careful in smaller places where we’ll look a little…out of place.”

She looks at him and he realizes she looks…dejected. Exhaustion lines her face, pulling all her features down.

“You don’t have to come with us,” she says.

He raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think I have much of a choice.”

That is the all-together most wrong thing to say. She leans forward all of a sudden, eyes blazing, mouth pinched small, but she is desperate – he can see it in the way her body teeters on the edge of falling out of her chair, over the arm rest. It would be comical if she didn’t look so sad.

“No,” she says. “I already forced you into this. I’m not going to _make_ you do anything.” She looks hard at him, as hard as she can without imploding. He nods, unsure what to say. “I woke you up against your will and I never…” She searches the air around her for the right words. “No, I would have done it again. Because I didn’t know. I thought…I thought they’d just try to forget about you. I thought _you_ forgot about you. I thought…I don’t know.”

She falls back into her chair and stares out the window, tall and deathly still.  His heart seizes in his chest. He sinks back, thoughts swirling. It would be a lie to say he wasn’t scared. If someone found them…well, there isn’t a single scenario he can think of that didn’t end in total horror. But even his own feelings are torn on the subject, shattered right down the middle, a crack created by a meteorite named Aisling.

She makes him forget he is dangerous. And that just makes it worse.

“You don’t have to come along,” she says. “I’ll help you find a place you feel safe.”

He presses his tongue against the back of his teeth. It was impossible to strategize a way around her.

“Ash,” he says carefully. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what kind of places are you talking about?”

She falls uncharacteristically silent for a long time. “My home.” Her voice cracks. “I don’t know anywhere else.”

“I know,” he says, gentle. “Look. I could have chosen to go back to sleep, way back when, but I _didn’t_.”

“I know, too,” she says, defiant. She turns to look at him, and he realizes her face is smothered with hair and sweat and angry tears but her eyes are spotlights, warm pieces of jasper. “But I know you are _scared_ and I hate that. I don’t want you to live a life of fear because of my choice.”

His face grows dangerously warm as he looks down at his lap.

“Yeah, well.” He takes a deep breath. “You chose to do that. But I chose this…I could have followed Steve. I could have followed anyone, or locked myself away, or…”

He looks out the window. Could he have? There was a part of his heart, sickened and diseased, smothered with the pus of bad things, but it was still _there_ – the part that refused to let someone who was good, someone who taunted conflict to stand for something right, be devoured by the fire of their own will.

“I chose to follow you.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t screw this up for us, alright?”

Her eyes crinkle together. She leans back and stares at him blearily, but she smiles slightly. “I _am_ a hellion.”

He pertinently ignores the warmth that squeezes his ribs.

“Do you want to know the reason?” she says. “Why I really woke you up?”

He settles further back in his chair. “Not for my looks, apparently.”

She snorts, and regards him for a long time. “You have to promise not to laugh.”

He bites back a smile. “No promises.”

She turns away from him and lounges back as far as she can go in her chair. She places her booted feet up by the controls and settles both of her arms across the arm rests before sighing dramatically. Her lips curl inward – was she embarrassed?

She yawns openly.

But then.

“I was lonely,” she says softly.

He feels like the sun is dawning on him. “Yeah, I don’t believe that for a second,” he says. “What about your bodyguard, the girl made out of wood?”

“I love Emma,” she says, eyes drooping. Her words slurred. “But I’m selfish.”

He teeters on a precipice. She has to know something, part of his heart screams, but what? He’s sorting through a fog of electricity to know what it is. “I know T’Challa had some crazy plan about how to fix us. I don’t buy it,” he says. This feels true. “But I’m not gonna leave you high and dry.”

 _Til the end of the line._ He swallows. And separately: _I know you’d do it for me._ His throat is constricting and his body is sore – all thanks to some bizarre sense of honor. Ridiculous. And yet…he is alive. He watches the stars twinkle against the edge of night and morning. So much time had passed in his life – who knew such a view would one day be possible?

It gives him a pang of fleeting hope…that one day, his extended life would have a reason.

She’s silent for too long, and he glances over at her. She’s half-lidded, but she’s pursing her lips, thinking.

“My people would forgive you,” she says quietly. “They look for the true self.” She smiles at him for a fleeting moment before her eyes slip shut. “We are good judges…of character.”

Another long silence passes between them. “Would _you_?” he asks. If he had killed her father? If he had killed her mother? She was prideful and angry and _beautiful_ and…too much like Steve, when he was small and had something to prove. Did she know how to let go?

But she does not answer. She breathes deeply – fast asleep.

\--

In an instant, Aisling startled awake. She blinked hard against the sudden light. The twilight had faded back to day and filled the window with golden swirls of blue and white.

She glanced over at the seat beside her – empty. Her chest felt hollow.

“Hello?” she said quietly.

A woman’s voice rang out behind her, and the air sizzled with electricity. “Back here,” Wanda called.

She looked about the cockpit for a moment, orienting herself before she unfolded from the chair. Her muscles screamed in response and her back creaked as she rose and stumbled toward the back of the ship. Wanda observed her approach with an amused smile.

“Good rest?” the woman asked. “You were out for a good couple hours there.”

Aisling raised her eyebrow. “Where did Bucky go?”

Wanda jerked her thumb back at a dark shape beneath a heavy blanket on a tiny bunk toward the side of the cabin. “He’s pretending to sleep,” she stage-whispered.

 “I’m sleeping,” he said, muffled under the blanket. “You’re just being loud.”

A laugh escaped Aisling at that. His eye poked out of the blanket as a greeting before he hid himself once again.

“I’m _trying_ to make sure we have supplies to live on when we land,” she said, a smirk unfurling as she watched Aisling. “You may know better than me what’s in here.”

Aisling tilted her head and extended a hand toward the woman. Wanda’s clothes were disheveled from sleep and frizzes of her hair stuck off the top of her scalp, but Aisling couldn’t help but smile. Wanda had a warm spirit, bright as a flame, and it was a pleasant change from her old day-to-day with tranquil scientists.

“Let’s start over,” Aisling said, cheery. “You are quite lovely. I am Aisling Siuvara.”

Wanda took her hand and shook it once, eyes squinting. “You already know me, it sounds like.”

Aisling winked. “Magic.”

Wanda laughed before she gestured toward metal boxes stored in the walls of the cargo bay. “All right, trouble,” she said. “Let’s see if we can find you a coat.”

Aisling nodded as they began to sort. Their current plan was to land in West Virginia and hike out toward Nebraska by hitching rides on any trains they could find (hopping on and off with the assistance of Wanda’s power and Bucky’s brute strength) and stopping at various but small traveler towns. Bucky would eventually find them a car, and he and Wanda would stick to it as close as possible while Aisling arranged for any food and lodging they’d need along the way.

Aisling remembered Bucky’s face when they decided this, amused and downtrodden. _I can’t believe the half-alien is the least conspicuous among us._

It wasn’t a great plan, but it was slightly better than no plan at all.

Luckily, the plane was stocked with various bits of survival gear. A bag that looked like the beginning of a tent, a couple of tight sleeping rolls, a couple gallons of water, some canteens and sparing rations, all stored in fire-proof boxes. It continued to floor her – Wakanda prepared for everything.

Except…for coats. They found one unwieldy, heavy black coat that looked more like a fire-fighter’s coat than anything else. Aisling’s heart skipped a beat – it all felt like a grand adventure, until she remembered that frostbite was a thing, as was starvation and dehydration and sleeplessness in the middle of a mountain winter. She knew Wanda was thinking of it too, throwing herself into sorting like a well-oiled machine.

So she sought to serve as the distraction as Wanda dug in a box of tools.

“Have you ever camped before?” Aisling asked.

Wanda took out a circle of rope and put it in one of the packs. “Not since I was very little. It was silly and fun then.” She smiled distantly. “My brother liked to put sticks in my hair.”

Aisling felt a jolt go down her spine – deep, inconsolable loss echoed in the air around Wanda so heavily that Aisling had to grip the box’s edge for a moment. The only feeling she could compare was the feeling she had standing at her father’s grave for the first time. “Siblings,” Aisling said simply in response. “Emma would do the same thing when we would ‘camp’ in my backyard.”

Wanda didn’t speak for a long moment. Aisling tried hard not to frown. She realized she was attuned to an…odd wavelength with Wanda. Similar to the kind she would share with her people: an array of intangible thought and unspoken feeling, laid bare without commentary from the other side.

But then the moment passed – a cloud, moving away from the sun.

“So,” Wanda said softly, without looking up. “What do you miss most about _Nebraska_?” She turned the state’s name over in her mouth, smiling devilishly.

Aisling sighed deeply. Warring emotions erupted in her gut – the open plains, the summer breeze, the silly festivals, the animals. Oh, her beloved chickens. But her mother, most of all. “Fancy cakes,” she decided, finally.

“Something your family baked?”

She laughed, cheeks turning hot. “No. Um. The ones that come in boxes at the store with the little girl on the front? You know. My mom would buy them for me when I was struggling with school…”

Wanda looked up to stare at her, eyebrows pinched together. Her mouth was open in an unsure smile.

Aisling pointedly looked down at the pile of tools and pulled out a small notebook and some pens. She put them in a pile beside her – the Aisling pile, which so far consisted of paper, pens, markers and a bizarre little thermometer. Wanda put them in a pack without a word. “You know? The…junk? I can’t find them in any of the stores in Wakanda.”

Wanda was suddenly grinning. “Little Debbie cakes?”

Aisling smiled bright. “Yes! You know what I’m talking about, right?”

A snorting burst of laughter suddenly came from the blanket pile behind her.

She whipped back toward the lumpy shape on the bunk. Bucky’s face emerged from underneath the blanket, guffawing.

Aisling glared at him and threw a spare pair of gloves at his head. “Oy, you! Go to sleep!”

“You would miss the _grocery store_ ,” he muttered, mouth still partly beneath the fabric, but his eyes were crinkled up. It was almost…cute. But not cute enough.

“Why didn’t you try to sleep earlier?”

“Because our pilot fell asleep at the wheel.”

She made a high-pitched noise akin to _doh_ and _eek_ combined. Wanda laughed softly at the sound. He smirked and snaked his arms out of the blanket to snatch the gloves before he sat up. He hunched over to avoid hitting his head on the bunk above him.

“And I was supposed to somehow help fix the both of you,” Wanda said, flat. She side-eyed Aisling. “Ridiculous.”

“I know,” Aisling said, pointedly ignoring the desire to make Bucky laugh _more_. “We’re a regular pair of goons.”

Bucky smiled but said nothing as he scooted to the edge of the bed and placed his head in his heads, waking up. Wanda looked back down into the open box with a knowing smile and Aisling tried (and largely failed) to refocus on organizing.

“So, alien girl,” Wanda said, conspiratorial. Her eyes rolled up to glance at Aisling. “Did they figure you out?”

Aisling laughed, but it choked a little in her throat. “Of course not.”

Wanda’s mouth twisted downward and tilted her head slightly. Pieces of hair fell across her face. It struck Aisling how young Wanda was. They were assuredly closer in age than she’d originally guessed.

“They’ll get over it,” the woman said, eyes cast down into the box, defiant, and she knew Wanda meant the Sitorai, and not the Wakandans. It bolstered her a little.

 “It wasn’t all bad,” Aisling said. “I was finally able to finish college.” Degrees in psychology and international relations. She smirked – a pair of degrees for a girl who once wanted to be a travelling doctor. But she felt cold at the thought. How different a girl she was then, five years ago when she’d decided on college at all.

“Well,” Wanda said, pulling down the last two boxes to sort – one for herself and one for Aisling. “Did they find out anything useful, at least?”

Aisling shrugged. “Something about…excess energy? From my—“ she pulled out air quotes, “ _inability to interface with minds_. Like my people can. It apparently fudges with my system,” Aisling said with a smile. “They tried to help me find outlets, but…” She waved her hand in the air, dismissive. “Nothing seemed to stick.”

“So how did I get mixed up in all that?” Bucky asked from the bed. He rubbed his head one last time before he rose and sat next to Aisling, pointedly staring at the boxes.

She observed him carefully. She noticed he had found a change of clothes – loose, dark brown pants, uniform style, and a crisp blue shirt. A heavy black jacket hung on the corner of the bunk.

“I thought maybe I could figure something out by trying to help someone else,” she said. “Alas.”

Wanda tapped her chin, pausing her endless sorting as her eyes blurred. “What was your theory?”

“Trigger words depend on…very strong memories,” Aisling said, fidgeting with her box’s latches. “If we can find those memories, break those memories down into their parts, figure out what matters and what was…done to you, perhaps you can control them again, instead of them controlling you.”

“No big deal,” Bucky said, smiling distantly. “Always said there wasn’t much up there to sort through anyway.”

She turned and winked at him and he snorted. Awe still lingered in her gut after his last guffaw, and her heart now felt buoyed on a warm sea. Anything was possible if Bucky Barnes could laugh. She felt an impossible, fleeting urge to reach out and touch his cheek, but she blinked hard enough in time to prevent it. Just in time. Wanda was glancing at her, and his eyes met hers, questioning – his soul humming, curiously…

A vicious beep sounded from the cockpit.

Wanda and Bucky sprung to their feet at once. Aisling sat still, hands locked around the edges of her unopen box, considering.

_That’s a proximity alert._

_Meaning something is close._

_Meaning…_

Suddenly, she was on her feet, too, stumbling toward the cockpit, gently touching Wanda and Bucky’s shoulders to sidle past them. She let her fingers linger as she walked by, against her better judgment – but she needed their strength.

“Map is picking up someone,” she said, carefully watching the blinking red dot in the display. Her heart rattled in her chest.

“By all the…” Wanda’s hands moved to her forehead, frustrated. “We’re _stealthed_!”

“Could be a passing aircraft,” Bucky said, arms crossed. Wanda shot him a hopeful but uncertain look.

Aisling half-tumbled into the chair. “Ship,” Aisling commanded, “what is the signature of proximate aircraft?”

The ship computer beeped cheerfully in recognition of the command. But then:

“Inaccessible. Ship signature is blocked.”

Bucky’s hand tapped the top of Aisling’s chair thoughtfully and Wanda leaned closer, as if to challenge the computer to change its answer. Aisling’s ears began to ring. Instinctively, she took a deep breath and reached with her mind, outward and outward, until she felt her spirit almost part with her body. She was floating on the sky, shining blue…

_Hello, darling._

All at once, she hit a cold, steel wall. She gasped at the horrible, unearned familiarity of the tendrils that reached back toward her, the stickiness of the soul, and she retreated at once, cursing herself. He was so tainted and sad and it made her feel such hate – toward herself and him.

“It’s Tamryn,” she breathed. By the Ancestors, why did she risk such a thing! “It’s him. He’s in that ship. I felt him.”

“Shit,” Bucky cursed under his breath. He scrambled to the back of the ship, toward the cargo. Wanda stood next to her. Solidarity.

“I’m not sure they know exactly where we are yet,” Wanda said. “If he did sense you, he should be beelining. But they’re not. They’re…lingering.”

It struck Aisling, then. She recognized the lingering formation from old games of hide and seek from her youth. Sitorai children liked to play by _sensing_ where their friends had gone – meaning those who were best at concealing their energy would win. She was always very good at hiding, but for the opposite reason. Her friends always complained her energy went…everywhere. And poor Tamryn. He was always so terrible at seeking, no matter who played.

But there was a variable they hadn’t considered. Her mouth popped open as the thoughts came together –

“Wanda,” Aisling said quickly. “Do you know how to quiet down your energy? To contain it?”

The woman leaned down so her eyes were level with Aisling’s. “My… _what_?”

“Take a deep breath and try to go to a nowhere place in your mind. Now.”

Perhaps startled by Aisling’s gentle but firm tone, Wanda sat in the chair beside her at once. Aisling began checking parameters for landing. _Please don’t let us be over the ocean still, please, please, please…_

“Ship, closest place to land?”

 “Calculating.”

“You do that,” she muttered as she scrambled out of the chair. She squeezed Wanda’s shoulder. “You’re doing well,” she whispered. “Think very hard about hiding.”

“Why?” Wanda asked, a tremulous mix of indignant and terrified.

“You are beautiful and bright,” Aisling said simply, “and he is drawn to it.”

She turned back toward the cargo bay without another word. There, as Aisling slipped through the doorway, she saw Bucky single-mindedly digging through a metal box, until he pulled out a flare gun – and a side-arm.

Her body felt stabbed by the pinpoints of a thousand, freezing needles. Bucky picked it up and inspected it with nary a blink, and Aisling wanted to slap the guns out of his hands. A memory pricked at her skull.

_I’m holding a gun. He tells me to shoot. I’m fighting him. But my arm shakes._

“Going to shoot all our enemies dead, are you?” she said. She felt dark and venomous. He whirled toward her at once. His face went from shock to pain to cool distance in the matter of a moment.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said, matching her venom for venom.

How quickly their laughter faded. She could sense the delicate center of his self-worth, wavering like summer grass, and she felt desolation sweep through her. A blaze, torching the valley. The belief rang so starkly true in his soul – he felt good for little else, and everything he’d seen since Steve had awakened him seemed to prove him right.

He was a killer. A machine. _And the way she was looking at him, like he was a terrible disappointment…_

She grabbed the pack Wanda had started for him and threw it at him. He caught it aptly. “You are here because of my idiocy,” she said, sharp as glass. “I’m not going to let you harm yourself or anyone else with that _thing_.”

His eyes widened in alarm. “I’m not gonna—”

She cut him off by tossing him his jacket. “You’re more than that. More than anyone made of you.”

He opened his mouth to respond, his world cracked between frustration and anger and yearning, when a loud boom shook the hull. Bucky instantly fell into a fighter’s stance while Aisling stumbled about like a fool. The unsecured materials on the floor rolled with a loud clamor in all directions.

She turned back toward the cockpit, eyes blurring. The Light cried out. “Wanda!” she shouted, afraid.

“They found us,” was her shaky reply.

Aisling ran toward the pilot’s chair as soon as she re-found her footing. “Ship! We need landing coordinates this instant!”

“Tree cover too intense. Advise alternative landing strategy.”

“Oh like _crashing to death_?” She resisted the urge to slap the console. At least they were at a place where there _were_ trees! “Manual control. Activating landing assistance.”

“Do not recommend—”

“Override!” she shouted. A light turned green on the dashboard as another volley of gunfire angled for the ship. “Shields?” she added meekly.

“85 percent.”

She glanced at Wanda, who was moving to escape the co-pilot’s chair.

“It’s not your fault, “Aisling said quickly. “None of this is anyone’s fault.” She tried to believe it. Wanda nodded tersely.

“You need to get them off our backs,” Wanda said. “Without killing us in the process.”

Like an echo in the woods, Bucky was suddenly there. “Ship, where are we?” he asked.

It listed coordinates before announcing: “Shenandoah Valley, Virginia.”

“Close enough,” Wanda muttered.

“Proximate ship is locking on,” the console announced.

Aisling’s blood thrummed in her head. _Please father, guide me._ “Everyone, hold on!”

She seized the controls and turned sharply. Bucky’s feet skittered underneath him as he held onto the back of her chair while Wanda went careening to the side. “Sorry!” Aisling shouted uselessly as she zigged and zagged through the clouds, her co-patriots stuck in place with their eyes squeezed shut. Wanda clung to Bucky’s ankle as he stood ground as hard as he could.

Aisling brought the ship down, down, down to try and lose Tamryn in the heavy clouds. Grey mist swirled outside the window, blasting the glass in condensation.

“Target lost,” the ship announced. She let herself breathe as she once again commanded it to find a decent landing location. “No landing locations available.”

“Just any place that is flat, damn you! I’m driving!”

Bucky helped Wanda stand up before he stumbled back into the cargo hold. “Does this thing have parachutes?” he shouted.

Aisling went cold. Wanda followed him toward the bay, its floor covered in doodads and survival gear. “Yes,” she said. “And harnesses. Somewhere in this mess. They were in the maybe pile.”

“What are you doing?” Aisling shouted, focusing on their descent. The computer chimed again.

“Proximate ship is locking on.”

Aisling screeched in anger as Bucky appeared behind her again.

“Okay Ash, I need you to listen to me,” he said as he leaned down to her ear. She nodded tersely. “Can you aim this ship at that bastard?”

She felt the old pins and needles feeling again. “Like, _crash into him_?”

“That’s the idea.”

The Light was screaming. Death was breathing down their necks, both their own and the possibility of others. Even Tamryn.

Her fists clenched. She dreamed of it, sometimes, of wrapping her hands around Tamryn’s neck until he stopped breathing, burying him in dirt, throwing his useless body into the ocean…

She hated it, the way it made her heart sing with relief. It wasn’t becoming of her. He would tarnish her soul forever, and then he would win, and she couldn’t allow that.

“Bucky, that’s crazy,” she stammered. “It’s more likely we’ll die in the jump or get caught in the…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. Explosion.

“We’ve got a super soldier and a witch,” Wanda said, clutching two packs. “We’re not going to die from this.”

“Trust me,” Bucky said. “People have done worse.”

The ship rattled as an explosion rocked the starboard side.

“Shields at 50 percent.”

Bucky’s hand lay lightly on her shoulder. Her hands white-knuckled around the controls.

“Ash. It’s them or us.”

A rotting feeling engulfed Aisling’s chest. “It’s never that!” she shouted, unbidden. Tears were close. There is only ever an ‘us’ – who was she to discern who was worth living or dying? Her mother would never forgive her for such thinking.

But as soon as Bucky leaned down and touched her wrist for a fleeting moment _,_ as soon as she felt Wanda fiercely grab her other shoulder and shout _We can’t let him find you_ , she knew.

She was never going to be like her mother.

“Ship,” she said, voice shaky. “Set autopilot coordinates for proximate ship on my mark.”

The ship whirred.

“Lady Siuvara, please set override code.”

She swallowed thickly as she stood. She tried to control her trembling as Bucky hoisted a parachute harness over her shoulders and lugged her pack onto her chest. She stumbled toward Wanda, following Bucky as he helped the woman strap in.

“I can slow our descent if you can hold onto her,” Wanda said, nodding at Aisling’s tandem harness. She tried to pack the large, unwieldy coat they found in Aisling’s pack. “Less parachutes, less attention.”

Aisling’s stomach flipped and flipped and flipped and flipped. She pushed a hand to her mouth and blinked hard. _Do not puke. Do not shatter. Be strong. You are a princess of Yunara Siuvara, daughter of Isamu._

The ship lurched, and she stumbled, only to be caught by Bucky, seizing her arms. “Shields 25 percent.”

Wanda opened the emergency door in the floor of the cargo bay. Wind whistled in Aisling’s ears, buffeted only by her beating heart. Bucky strapped her harness to the one on his chest so that her entire back was against him.

“Keep your limbs wide, okay? Like you’re gonna fly,” he told them. “And don’t scream.”

Aisling nodded too quickly.

Wanda grabbed Aisling’s hand as they both looked down through the open door. Forests and the rolling topography of old mountains and valley farms peeked through the clouds.

“Together!” Wanda shouted.

Bucky squeezed her other hand, once.

She shouted with all her might. “Override code! Tamryn Sychalle!”

The ship shuddered. And then they jumped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember how i said the chapters will go back to normal length  
> lol jk its even longer  
> will likely go through and make edits. Sorry for slow update! Likely won't be another one until next week, too...


	7. Chapter 7

_The Fires are coming._

Tamryn thinks of the old Siuvaran scripture, and not without a sense of irony. But of course it fits – if you take something, and twist it out of context just long enough, any collection of words senselessly thrown together will eventually find meaning.

He feels no fear as the ship he’s been chasing turns toward his own. It beelines toward their cockpit window, and he feels nothing at all except that pressing sense of injustice that’s been haranguing him since he could walk.

His Princess Aisling is on that ship – and then she is not. He feels it, simple as that, as her spirit flies down and away, until it is lost in the constant buzz that fills his senses. His lips curl into a sneer. Her cleverness yet survived. The thought barrels forth, a bitter mixture of pride and annoyance.

As soon as he had felt her Presence, his heart had quickened. Her beautiful softness, the bright instant _pull_ that was her soul. She would never let him take his vengeance, even if he is partly doing it for her. She was the future, and so was he, and soon the rest would all learn what that meant.

_And I stand in the face of its Evil, and step into the water of life._

He takes one look at his followers flying the ship. What a waste, he thinks. This isn't like you, Princess.

But he turns his back, and thinks not of it again.

\--

An explosion broke the sky, but Aisling could not scream. She was crashing, down and down and down, her senses open like a wound to the collision above her. Broken souls slipped from the Light, sighing as they escaped toward the heavens. _We did this._ She was going to be sick.

But she couldn’t move or breathe.

She clutched the harness, eyes squeezed shut, and thought of one thing: the brick of warmth above her, solid and strong. She summoned that strength, wore it like armor. She was not alone in this. Bucky was there. They were flying.

Not enough.

Metal whistled past their heads, and she instinctually tried to rein her body into a ball, but the air was fighting her, pushing her, and all she could do was trust Bucky not to kill them. They fell and fell – she had no idea for how long – until he yanked a cord, and her lungs felt torn from her chest. By the stars, she couldn’t fathom this anymore…she had to wake up, escape from this nightmarish paralysis, this seizing feeling of complete uselessness, the locking of her joints, the watering of her eyes, the wind tearing at her skin…

_Oh god, everything is breaking._

She felt Wanda’s ember spirit, reaching. They were falling, but then they were drifting, and the world started to warm and slow. Her limbs began to unfreeze, her fingernails stopped digging bloody holes in her palms and she opened her eyes for a moment....

For a moment, she was a wisp of a dogwood tree.

Slipping between the branches on a red summer breeze…

But then the chill of late fall slipped into her bones as the Light, the energy surrounding her, shrieked and shook. The leaves turned from green to yellow and red and brown, a world on fire, slipping all at once into the death of winter. The world spun. The sky was melting. Time was malleable, and she was alone, open-mouthed, screaming in a dark room, screaming in her closet, into a pillow so her mother wouldn’t hear, screaming in an open field, unable to keep it a secret anymore, shoving her fist in her mouth, biting on her knuckles because _no one will believe you—_

Her feet crashed to the ground and pain shot up her legs. Someone was trying to pull her hands from her face, but couldn’t they see she was turning into stone? She fell to her knees and down onto her stomach, curling into a ball against the ground, her back arched toward the sky, and she was screaming into the dirt, throat raw.

Warm, delicate fingers touched her cheek and moved her hair out of her face. A voice, from within her own head: _Aisling. We’re all right. Breathe._

Aisling opened her mouth and took in as deep a breath as she could manage. She stared down into the earth, and took solace in its solidity. She dug her fingers into the ground, and breathed and breathed and breathed. The smell of the world…birds, slowly returning to their chirping, the wind rustling the tree branches.

She heard, then, the tenor of panicked voices.

“We are all okay now, Bucky.”

Feet, pacing against the grass, flashing dark in her peripherals.

“You’re panicking. Sit down.”

The pacing stopped, but this double-edged anxiety that’s eating him from the inside – it’s no longer everywhere or making her vision shake. But it was there, inside of him, barely constrained against fragile shields. He was frightened – a thousand reasons, like the thousand sides of an eye.

Aisling pushed herself to a sitting position and put a hand to her head. Wanda’s arms were around her shoulders. The woman visibly relaxed when Aisling looked at her. The realization of purpose, like someone seizing a rattling gong, gave her clarity, though panic still scratched at her gut and she shook so hard she could barely breathe.

They needed a warrior, a fighter. She was neither of those things. But she would try.

Wanda’s mouth popped open a moment before she spoke. “Oh my god. Aisling. You…god. Are you all right?”

Bucky suddenly loomed beside her. He was too antsy to sit but he kneeled close by. Aisling couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “Emma said something about this,” he said flatly.

Her brain felt akin to molasses. But Aisling nodded, and tried to even out her voice even as tears lingered in her eye sockets. “Yes. Are you all alright?”

Wanda’s face screwed up, her eyebrows knitting together. She squeezed Aisling’s shoulders tight and nodded vigorously. The adrenaline from the jump and the explosion was catching up to her, too, and Aisling could see Wanda bite her lip to fight back tears. The young woman rubbed her face with the back of her hand, quickly, as if to erase the weakness.

Aisling touched the woman’s shoulder. “We’re not very good at parachuting, are we?”

Wanda snorted into a gurgling laugh. A smile graced her face for a moment.

By the stars.

“Bucky?” she said evenly. She turned toward the man, who was pointedly not looking at her. He stared down at the dirt, lost in a myriad of thought, eyes glassy with somewhere-else-ness. Her heart flipped and against her will, her hand reached up to grab his shoulder, to give him something to steady himself by. She cursed herself. Surely, he would tense or shake her off or tell her to leave him alone, and a beat passed and she waited.

Her hand settled. He did nothing. She could feel his heat through his shirt, feel the spasms of trembling pass through him, on and off, using his might to keep it all in. He’d taken off his parachute harness – hers still scratched awkwardly at her inner arms, she realized – and clutched in his hands a heavy, dark jacket.

Cold bit at her skin. True sensations, coming back slowly. She leaned forward and peered into his face. “Are you there?” she asked. “Are you with me?”

Their eyes met. _What a ridiculous question. He’s right here. You’re the one that had been…elsewhere. You’re the crazy one. But he did say it, didn’t he…that you are both messed up, and this is it. This is happening. This is who we are._

_Poor Wanda._

He nodded brusquely. He reached up to tap her hand on his shoulder with his metal hand, like he was tapping out. Two quick but gentle touches.

She blushed fiercely and let go at once, forcing herself to stand to save face even though the world was spinning a little. Wanda looked up at her, concerned. “You able to walk?” she asked.

Aisling stubbornly pulled down on the edge of her sweater and worked very hard to pretend vertigo wasn’t real. “Mhmm.” She was looking at the ground, trying to orient herself, but then she finally looked up – and she remembered.

_We are in the mountains._

She couldn’t help it. She gasped and stepped forward, and then spun around.

It didn’t help her vertigo, so she stumbled around like a dumbass for a second, but that didn’t matter anymore.

Trees, taller than any building in her home town. Leaves turning fiery red, golden yellow and warm brown in the biting chill. The way light peeked between trunks. The way the world seemed to build around their crash site, as if they were the valley of a diorama. She ran to the nearest tree edge of their tiny clearing – she vaguely heard Bucky mutter a _Woah wait_ – and looked out.

“Oh my gosh!”

The earth rolled into highs and lows, splattered with color as if someone had spilled fire paint everywhere. Nestled in spots were crumbly farm houses, surrounded by swaths of empty land, but land that still curved, still followed the echoes of Earth’s oldest waves…

She realized too late she was speaking a little too loudly. She slammed a hand around her mouth just as Bucky ran up behind her and gently pulled her back a little from the clearing edge. She turned to him, grinning brightly, pointedly ignoring his worry. “I’ve never been to the mountains before.”

Something still rattled at the edge of his blue-grey gaze, but his face softened into a smile. “I can tell,” he said. “You know, if you go over a cliff, you’ll fall.”

She grasped the edge of her sweater and squished it between her fingers. His face was too close. She couldn’t look at it. Luckily, Wanda bounded beside them a moment later, clutching two coats, looking out into the clearing, gasping a little herself.

“Well. That’s not a bad view,” she said quietly.

“We’ll see how much you like it when we’re camping in it,” Bucky said. He poked Aisling’s shoulder. The simplicity of the gesture made her hair stand on end. “Do you need help with your harness?”

“No!” she sputtered, too quickly, and turned her immediate attention to the thing on her chest. He nodded brusquely and turned back toward the clearing.

She fiddled with the straps as Wanda stared out, thoughtful. Bucky gathered up their bags and started cutting at the black parachutes with a knife he had stored in his boot (of course), stuffing parts of it into their packs. Distracting himself with work.

Once she got her harness off, Wanda handed her the big, ugly coat. A bizarre peace came over Aisling, despite it all – the old post-storm calm. They made it out alive. They were together. They had nothing but the packs on their backs and a set of short-ranged walkies, but it felt, bizarrely, like enough.

But then, police sirens wailed in the distance.

Bucky stood at attention instantly, head swiveling. He motioned the women away from the edge of the clearing. Wanda’s forehead creased as she looked about, ignoring his directive. Aisling hovered between the two of them, looking back and forth.

Reality, crashing in at once.

Wanda pointed outward over the clearing. “There. The road’s over there. I can see the lights.”

“Well then,” Bucky said, hoisting a pack on his back, snapping the straps in front together. “Let’s go the long way ‘round.”

\--

They sought out paths down and through the mountainside, sticking to the tree line as much as possible.  They needed to follow the roads toward civilization, but didn’t want to get caught unawares by any passersby or police.

They were wanted criminals, after all.

Well. Not Aisling. But she could do little in the face of a police assault except maybe, _maybe_ make everyone fall asleep if she thought it at them hard enough, but it had been years since she’d tried anything so reckless.

Either way. She wasn’t going to let them take her friends away.

How few people she could give that title to.

“Ash,” Wanda said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Aisling shrugged. The earth hummed, and sometimes, if she moved her head too fast, the world would turn upside down for a single, horrible moment, but otherwise, nothing she couldn’t handle. “Just thinking,” she said cheerfully. “I’m fine.”

Aisling could feel the woman’s eyes boring into the back of her skull. But it was Bucky who spoke – the first time since he started directing their great march. “So what triggered it?”

She shrugged. “You remember what I said about the energy.”

“No,” he said. “I mean the panic attack.”

Aisling’s face burned. She wanted to slip away from them. Fall into the dirt and disappear.

“It’s complicated.” She clicked her teeth together. But they deserved a better explanation than that. “I don’t like…feeling helpless.”

Bucky nodded simply and said nothing, but she could feel…only what she could compare to _understanding_ flood her senses. A boy, falling, hand reaching out to a friend – he’s so different now, but now, as he faces death, as he knows it’s coming, he sees the scrawny blonde boy from Brooklyn, and nothing has changed –

She only realized she had stopped walking when Wanda turned around to face her. Wanda reached a hand out. But Bucky kept walking – his back pointedly turned against the past.

\--

They walked in silence until the sun was almost beneath the earth. She watched the light slant through the trees, fainter and fainter, until shadow descended and the air took on a hint of twilight blue.

She was beginning to hate it.

For a while, quietly exclaiming (largely to herself) the merits of certain trees or plants sufficed. She extolled the loveliness of the passing, ancient farmhouses so she could stop thinking about her aching feet. She spoke wonders about the dirt, the setting sun, the leaf that got caught in her wild hair so she would stop thinking of the pains shooting up her legs. Her companions barely responded to her commentary, and she understood. They were avoiding the police – and with a cold shot of fear, she once again recognized that Tamryn was…an unknown.

Would his death really be that easy? A jump, a sigh, the shackles gone?

Her heart quickened. She wouldn’t believe it unless Wanda or Bucky could summon a body before them. Her breathing started to shallow. _Break free of this heavy, laden spirit._ She thought of an old, old sermon her mother favored. _Think only of the home of Heaven, wherein the Stars roam free and our ancestors reside._

“Two options,” she announced. “Either I will force you to play I Spy—”

“First guess,” Bucky said, drawn but teasing. He didn’t even turn back to look at her. “Tree.”

Brightness speared her chest. “Okay. Wow. You want to play I Spy, James?”

“It’s Bucky.”

“Second guess,” Wanda deadpanned. “A leaf.”

“By all the...” Aisling pretended annoyance, but she was just glad they were talking to her again. “Or! Rude ones. We can take turns answering questions.”

The other two flashed each other a fearful and amused look.

Aisling sighed. She had been prepared for a bit of a fight. “Honestly. The silence weighing on you all like a wet blanket. I really think it might help get our minds off—”

“I’ll start,” Wanda said. “Bucky. What is Steve’s biggest pet peeve?”

Bucky ticked when his name was mentioned, but thawed immediately upon mention of Steve. Aisling’s heart flew. “People walking really slowly in front of him.”

Aisling smiled distantly, only really knowing Steve from the news and Bucky’s memory, where he held an unwavering presence. A grounded, serious soul. Good-hearted and solid like earth. But Wanda snickered. “Really?”

Bucky grinned crookedly. “I used to stop right in front of him so suddenly that he’d run into me.”

“I’ll have to try that next time we see him,” she said.

“We will see him,” Aisling affirmed, seeing the way Bucky’s smile hesitated. “Now, you ask one of us something.”

And so it began, with more verve than Aisling expected. Bucky asked Wanda an innocuous question about where Steve got his clothes these days, leading to a story about how Steve once tried to alter his own pair of pants, to another question about where Bucky got _his_ clothes and why he tore off the left sleeve of everything if he was trying to be conspicuous (“When I don’t need to hide, it’s easier to move.”).

Eventually, Aisling was prompted by a nervous Bucky into stories about Nebraska (pointedly not looking at Wanda, who was watching him with renewed curiousness) and the farmlands. She exclaimed once again about the elevation and rolling hills of the Shenandoah, so different compared to her home, causing Bucky to laugh out loud. Her whole body shook a little.

“You ain’t ever seen anywhere besides a farm before?”

She huffed. “Have _you_ ever seen anything beyond the city?”

He shrugged, nonchalant. “I’ve seen things.”

Wanda snorted at that. “Oh, _things_.”

“She lived in Wakanda.” He threw his arms forward mutedly. “Barely anyone knew they existed back in…my day,” he said, nose scrunching. “God. Sorry.”

Aisling laughed. But then she shrugged. “I wasn’t really allowed anywhere beyond the palace most of the time so...I don’t know. It was lovely and green as the emerald sea and enshrouded by mist. But that’s all I could see from my window.”

He slowed for a moment, just enough for her to catch up and walk beside him. She smiled at his thoughtful face, catching his eye. Instinctively, he smiled back, easy as light – before it was once again taken over by some shadow of a thought.

But it was okay. A terrible flight of humor seized her chest so quickly she felt tingly inside. “Anyway, you already know the important role farms play in our society and why they must be on flat land, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” he said, side-eying her. A half-question mark hung in the air. He knew her well enough to know something was coming, but he didn’t have the foresight to guess what.

“Right. But you don’t know why?”

He mumbled something else about plants and family in Indiana and corn that she didn’t quite catch. An evil smile spread across Wanda’s face as she picked up on what was happening, but Wanda was fiddling with her water canteen and so he didn’t pay her any mind.

“Well, you see, agricultural science is a finicky thing,” Aisling said. “But over time, everyone realized that if the planting land isn’t _just flat enough_ , the seeds will grow, but the plant will literally fall out of its original planting hole, to put it in layman’s terms. Like a rock rolling down a hill.”

He looked at her, brow furrowed, for a long moment and she looked back placidly. “Are you…what?”

“Yes! I’ve seen many a promising young corn just fall out of its hole because of bad elevation.”

His eyes widened, as if he was considering it, but then Wanda laughed and sputtered, spraying water out of her nose. Only then did Bucky glare at Aisling, face turning a mottled red. “Oh my god.”

Aisling guffawed at their reactions and winked mischievously at Bucky, who flushed even deeper and strode a few steps in front of her, hair falling in front of his face like a sheet.

“I can’t believe you,” he muttered.

“You’ll need to try that on Steve,” Wanda said, breathless.

“I’ve _seen_ things,” Aisling declared mockingly, crossing her arms over her chest with a dramatic flourish. Wanda snorted and put a hand over her mouth to hide it.

Bucky made some sort of growly _yeah, yeah_ sound but he soon fell silent once again.

“So it’s my turn to ask?” Aisling said, gleeful. “Fabulous. Wanda, how about—”

Bucky stopped abruptly in front of her and she didn’t have time to catch herself before she walked right into his backpack. Her center of gravity was already off due to her own pack, so she tumbled backward instantly onto her butt with a loud squeak.

“Aah!”

For a moment, she wondered if he had spotted something out in the woods, and her adrenaline spiked between her ribs. But then he turned back and smiled at her.

Full and bright, teeth and all. Not a flash of light, but a beam.

Her face turned red for a variety of reasons, but, she told herself, she was flushing largely out of response to his _impudence_. Wanda laughed raucously in the background. By all the ancestors! What was going on!

“Hey!” was all she managed to shout.

“You’ll get him back,” Wanda said as she helped Aisling back onto her feet. “Come on.”

Aisling glared out at the man who abandoned her. Bucky indeed walked on, like nothing unusual had happened whatsoever. At another point in his life, he might even have whistled.

So she was annoyed when her heart fluttered with what she could only call stupid, stupid hope.

\--

As night falls, he listens to the women speak.

He pointedly avoids listening once the conversation turns, as all conversations in his vicinity do these days, to home. But it’s hard to turn their voices out – the winding softness of Wanda, the sing-songy chirps of Aisling – when the tedium of walking forces you to dwell on memories you’d rather forget.

He’d rather listen to Aisling speak hours at a time.

_You didn’t even think that sarcastically._

_I did. Sort of._

That was a growing problem, too. Not the internal back and forth – that was a new reality – but the opposite of dwelling on old memories.

Thinking of possibilities. Possibilities that were so unlikely, slim and all-together unadvised that he would be better off thinking of new ways to punch himself in the face. He rubs his metal shoulder, and tries to focus on its dull sting as Aisling launches into another story about Nebraska.

This one was about Emma and their youth, and how Emma would spend almost entire summers with Aisling at her home, avoiding her parents as much as she could. His investigative tick kicks in: Emma came from, if not an abusive household, one that held Emma to a standard she was not meant to meet. He almost feels bad for not trying to befriend her sooner before he thinks, harshly, _She has her reasons, and so do you._

He misses the transition, and suddenly Wanda is speaking of her own summers in Sokovia with the hardness of someone pretending recent events did not and could not imperil the memories of her youth. Wild summers with her brother, up and down the city streets, biking and soccer and staying out until the sun was well past the buildings. A ping of nostalgia hits him so hard that his dry eyes sting. It hadn’t been so different for him and Steve, back when they were schoolboys.

Maybe it would be easier if he remembered nothing at all. But then who would he be but the person HYDRA made?

“Bucky?” He realizes Aisling has been trying to ask him something for a few moments now. He startles as he looks down at her. She is panting as she catches up to him, hands clasping her backpack straps. “What about New York? What was it like?”

“Uh,” he says. He didn’t think he’d say anything at all, to be frank, but Jesus Christ. He fucked up as soon as he looked at her face. Now he is doomed to say something stupid. “Lots of people. You know. All packed together.”

_God damn it._

But Aisling just nods. “That would frustrate me. I miss the open space.”

He shrugs a little. He can’t help but smile slightly, too. “It was home. Piss stains and all.”

Aisling raises an eyebrow at that. “Can’t be worse than a sow barn.”

She eyes him, waiting. He looks down at her, eyebrow raised, pretending he is much more confident than he actually is, which is pretty much how he functioned as a rule these days.

He looks away and racks his brain. Of course he would answer. He can’t yet find it in himself to deny her.

And then a memory shimmers to life. He almost gasps at the…simplicity of it. The beauty of it.

“One year, after a really bad ice storm, Steve and I ice skated down the street. You didn’t even need skates…” His voice is filled with distant awe. “No cars. No noise. Just kids laughing…snow on the cars. Snow everywhere. Everything felt…insulated. And everything sparkled. Like we were in a snow globe.”

They all fall silent. Crickets have started to chirp, and frogs begin their nighttime calls. All their homes are distant or gone or unreachable or changed. There would be no going back for any of them – at least, not the way they left.

No one knows how to break the silence now. So Bucky, master strategist, turns to the basics.

“It’s night,” he says. “Let’s camp.”

\--

Aisling’s whole body ached as she lied on the hard ground, staring up into the thousand stars. _Are they the same Thousand Stars?_ _The ones my people call holy?_  The question was one she had been asking for as long as she could remember. And perhaps it was so…the sky was streaked with so many, it seemed impossible that there could be another Thousand Stars waiting elsewhere.

Her father was up there…waiting.

She heard the scratch of pencil against old paper and Bucky’s soft, sputtering snores from across the embers. She wanted to giggle at the sound, but knew Wanda would whack her with a pencil if she did.

Wanda took first watch – after talking down an insistent but fading Bucky – and upon that announcement, had pulled out of her coat a tiny, well-worn journal with cracked gold filigree around the edges of the pages. Aisling rather liked that detail. It was wonderfully indulgent.

“Go to sleep,” Wanda said flatly. She was sitting fairly close, against a nearby tree trunk. Aisling was only a foot or two away, close to the fire to try and stave away her constant chill.

“I know,” was the only thing Aisling could come up with. Her feet throbbed to the beat of her heart, which had served as a distraction for only a few minutes or so. She kept losing count. “I’m sorry.”

The pencil scratches sputtered away, stopping and starting, until Aisling heard the woman place the pencil in the spine of her book. Her voice was not unkind when she finally spoke…it was wary. And soft. A feather’s touch, afraid to startle. “What’s wrong?”

Even though her body screamed and ached, Aisling managed, wincing, to roll over and face the woman. “Do you think we’ll be able to walk tomorrow?”

Wanda smiled wanly at that. “It’s a good thing you were wearing boots,” was all she said.

Aisling watched Wanda’s face. Not for the first time, she wondered what the other girl saw. Did the Light, oppressive and guiding, hateful and protecting, haunt her gaze – energy misplaced by the virtue of her birth? Was her vision tinged red, always, with the power – hungry to escape, unsure how to go about it?

“You’re very strong,” Aisling said.

Wanda’s face flushed. Her mouth flickered between a smile, a smirk and a frown, before she looked back down at her book and pushed her hair out of her face. She seemed to fight between joking and telling the whole truth, and ultimately settled with a true thing that sounded jocular in an off way. “Life isn’t fair to people like us.”

People like us. Aisling’s chest felt warm, despite the despair that lingered on the edge of her words. She let her body hum with pain for another moment. “So what are you doing?”

Wanda tapped the journal with her pencil. Her eyes lingered across the fire – likely to ensure Bucky didn’t jerk awake, as he was wont to do. “I haven’t had time to think about it.”

Aisling felt her eyes fight to slip shut, and she forced them open. “I don’t…want you to do anything you don’t want to do. I told that to Bucky and it applies to you, too.” She smiled distantly, into the sky. “Between the two of you, I’m not sure which one got screwed over by other people’s decisions more.”

“I know. I heard. You two fight like old grandmothers.”

Aisling blushed. “Don’t get me started.”

Wanda laughed at that, covering her mouth to dull the sound. But it faded as her eyes glassed over, and she was looking elsewhere. “I don’t know…I want to help. I want…” She sighed and leaned her head back against the tree trunk. “The Avengers were supposed to do that. You see how that went.” She looked pointedly at Bucky. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now.”

Aisling thought of her mother. She would love this view, she thought vaguely. The mountains wouldn’t scare her…nothing scared her. But she would be better at understanding what the stars were trying to tell her—what they wanted Aisling and Wanda to know. Her mother could summon wisdom out of air. Aisling stumbled, useless, through signs. “You keep trying?” is all she could think to say.

Wanda shuffled, but a small smile graced her face. She turned her eyes back to Aisling. “It’s why I’m here,” Wanda said finally.

Aisling beamed. Wanda rolled her eyes, but she was still smiling, too.

But there was something else, something digging…not at Wanda, but at herself. She was able to beat it back by the sheer monotony of their march…by the way her body beat her into thoughtlessness. She’d eaten her rations so dully that she could barely remember eating them now, perhaps only an hour or so later.

But now that she was lying alone in the cold dark, it was hard to fight everything on the inside. Bucky snored. Wanda stared into nothing, praying for calm. The Light was cruel in its memory.

There are some holes that can never be re-filled.

“Wanda,” she said. “I’m sorry you are sad.”

Wanda’s face was unchanging, but Aisling suddenly felt searched over. The hair stood up on her neck. “You are too,” was all she said. It was both question and accusation, kind but pointy.

Aisling couldn’t answer. She hurt too much. Everywhere.

\--

Bucky is listless, watching into the viscous shadow of the night. His body doesn’t feel like his own. It hasn’t for…decades. A frozen hunk of meat, half metal, too big in the shoulders, too big in the chest. He didn’t build this. It’s someone else’s muscle, built for something he remembers only in bloody spots.

He realizes it even still – running into doorframes with a singular grace. Aisling had laughed at him when he did it the first time, and he vowed to pay more attention, then –

And he realizes it now when he hears a shuffling in the woods.

White noise fills his ears. He seeks out the two women in the dark, but oddly, he can’t…see them.

_Oh god._

He swivels his head, side to side, and all at once, everything is a fog.

_No._

White eyes and snow-white skin emerge from the dark – a man in a deep camo uniform, wielding an assault rifle.

Bucky jumps into position, but his body is slower than he remembers. He is moving through gelatin – delayed just enough for him to almost fall down instead of steady himself, fists up, legs wide. He tries to shout, but it comes out a guttural whisper. _Get up! Aisling! Wanda!_

He finally sees them. They are so far away…lying down, unmoving, around a dying fire. Sleeping. Dead?

His heart hammers wildly in his chest as he tries to run toward the man, but he suddenly can’t move – there are wraps around his arms, around his ankles, and now the man is in front of him, grinning, blood running down his face, out of his nose –

_Report, soldat_.

The blood splatters onto Bucky’s arm, hot and sticky, and all he can do is scream, screaming, shouting, get away from me, get away, _I’ll never follow you again_ —

_Bucky!_

His eyes open to a weight on his chest. His metal fist flies, adrenaline singing, and there is a high-pitched shriek before he hits an invisible wall – no, not invisible, but a shimmering, glowing _red_ …

“Barnes!” It’s Wanda.

They’re alive.

And there is Aisling, sprawled on the ground in front of him, halfway splayed on his legs, an arm up in front of her face. A hair-pin space between his fist, her nose, and the shield Wanda had managed to summon in the nick of time.

“No,” he breathes. He covers his face instantly, ashamed. He pretends he is merely rubbing his eyes with his hands and wrists, but he knows there are tears there.

“Bucky.” Aisling’s voice is shaky, but he hears her get up and move toward him. A soft hand touches his wrist, still in front of his face.

He instinctively shies back. The touch disappears.

“You were screaming,” Aisling says. It’s smartly matter-of-fact. He stops rubbing his face and looks at her. She is hovering close, with Wanda standing behind her a few feet, tense, hands in odd claw shapes, eyes red.

“You’re okay now,” Aisling continues. “I promise.”

A few long moments pass. He listens to his hammering heart, but when he looks at his arms, still hot with the sergeant’s blood, he only finds dirt and the clean, white bandage from earlier.

“I almost punched you,” he croaks out. He can’t look at her face.

“And I would have probably deserved it, shaking you the way I was!” Her brightness is put on, but not quite fake. The relief he senses is quite, incredibly, real. She turns back to look at Wanda. “We’re all good here, my dear. Go back to sleep.”

Wanda’s stance relaxes mildly, but she doesn’t sit down. Nervous energy rolls off of her in intense waves. “I’m going to…take a walk. Or something. Around the camp.”

“Be careful,” Aisling says, but she doesn’t try to stop her. Wanda stalks off into the dark, her hand glowing red with light.

Aisling walks back to her bedroll.

He is suddenly seized with the desire to reach out, to stop her. _Come back._ He is shaking, but forces himself to lie down, his face turned toward Aisling and the small fire.

She fishes around her pack. He recalls: Wanda had taken first watch, meaning she must have taken second. Papers are scattered across her blue blanket – one he recalls giving to her, because she was shaking so hard in the cold. He didn’t feel the cold as much anymore these days.

She finds something…and then, inexplicably, walks back toward him. She sits close, and looks over his prone form. He can feel his heart beating wildly in his chest, but a confused warmth, just a split second of it, fills his ribs as she gingerly sets a small pad of paper and a pencil on his chest.

Then she lies down next to him.

Their shoulders do not touch – there is a good foot of respectful space between them – but he can feel her presence, all the same. His arm closest to her, the one still made of muscle, tingles.

“What’s this for?” he manages to ask.

“Doodle out the thoughts,” she says simply, as if this made sense. Her obnoxiously large coat swishes softly as she adjusts her position. “It’s okay if you can’t sleep again. Sometimes I can’t either.”

He reaches up to touch the paper and pencil – it was red, with a perfect eraser – but leaves it on his chest for now. He turns his head slightly to look at her.

“I can’t believe I almost punched you,” he says. It slips out, like most of the things he says nowadays.

“I can,” she says. A small laugh lurks in her voice. “I’ve almost punched Emma more times than I can count. Don’t know why she tries to wake up me anymore, to be honest.”

Bucky can imagine this. It explains Emma’s…technique when trying to wake Aisling up. “She must really like you.”

“Well,” she says. “I don’t have a metal fist.”

She tries to wink at him, but it mostly just looks like her face twitches oddly, the way she is lying down. He bites back a smile. His heart cracks a little.

“I _am_ sorry,” he says softly.

“If you meant to punch me, you would have done it, somehow,” she says, matter-of-fact.

He can’t help but laugh at her simplification of it. “That’s true,” he says. “I usually don’t miss.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, encouraging. “I know.”

He takes in a deep breath and turns back toward the sky. The stars are there, pinpoints against black. They are in the deepest part of night, what the soldiers used to call the witching hour. Odd things happened. Nightmares came to life, alongside dreams.

He doesn’t miss the meaning of it.

Suddenly, Aisling is fidgeting. He glances back toward her. She too is facing the stars, watching them with a singular intensity, as if searching for something. “I…I couldn’t sit there and listen to you shout for help. I’m sorry. I know you wish I didn’t know.”

His heart falls, and then is buoyed, and his body fills with sweet cold. He swallows thickly.

“They do fade with time,” she says, voice quiet. “You find ways to tell the difference. Doesn’t make them better. Doesn’t always help. But one night…you won’t have the dream…and then maybe two nights, before it comes back…”

God. He wishes for it. He wishes for it every night. But it also feels like penance he needs to serve before he can join the rest of man. Another burden to bear, in honor of those lost because of him.

“I don’t understand,” he says, so quietly, a thought accidentally breathed to life.

“What?”

He still doesn’t understand why she singled him out for help, out of the billions of people in the world who call out for it. He feels unfairly blessed by it, like God made a mistake.

Or, as his mother would say: _Like God was giving him a path_.

He never cared much for church growing up – he had remembered that early on – because God always seemed to be one of two characters. Either an overbearing Lord who asked too much, or a loving source of guidance who would, even through unspeakable loss, be somehow leading you down the right path. Neither squared quite right with him. He was always just going to be James “Bucky” Barnes, regardless of what God had to say about it.

His face screws up, thinking about it. The hubris of youth.

“I don’t know how to be more than this,” he says finally. This life. This body. This fate, this dream. This is all there is left – a man with nothing but the faded morals of his old life, cracked and tarnished like old silver.

She turns from the stars toward him. Her eyes seem filled with them – the light of a thousand other places – but her frown is entirely human. The way her eyebrows furrow, her chin twitches. The streak of dirt on her cheekbone. He realizes he is looking at her too long, but exhaustion is pressing in again, and he can’t look away.

It’s in her eyes, too, the desire to fly away.

“Me either,” she says. She sounds distant, thinking of something else. “But that’s always what they expect, isn’t it?”

He’s more than the Winter Soldier. But he’s the same man in the same body, and he was the one who had to work through the pieces.

“I’m not him,” he says. “But I did those things.”

“And I can’t change who I am,” she says. She smiles sadly, despite it all. “Whoever that’s supposed to be.”

Her fingers brush his hand for a moment, before they wrap around his palm. He isn’t sure what to do – all his synapses stopped firing a moment too long – so he’s motionless as she squeezes his hand, once.

“We have to choose the path from here. Every moment, our choice,” she says. “That is how we win.”

Her voice shakes a little but she sounds so…sure. He wants to take that sureness, and bottle it up. He doesn’t know what to do except squeeze her hand back, and think about what it means that they were both kept at Wakanda, about the coincidence, about the…hope he has, that it happened at all.

_Are you being serious right now, Barnes? Nothing has happened but more trouble since then._

But, he thought as she sat up – as her hand slipped out of his a little too quickly and she sat up against a tree, reaching for a sterile white journal and red pencil of her own – for the first time, it wasn’t all the bad kind.

He picked up the pad and pencil on his chest as he sat up, too. She started humming as he started writing. Her humming turned to singing, under her breath, like she didn’t even notice, and he felt it again – energy, reaching out toward him. Thoughts of plains in the west. Of mothers. Of shields.

_By the water way,_

_You were forgiven_

_Throwing stones at the waves,_

_Right where I left you._

 

He smiles. It is his old favorite kind of trouble, in fact.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra long chapter due to my busy self this month, enjoyyyy. Will they ever get shorter? Who knows!
> 
> Lyrics that Aisling sings are from Hollow Body Weather, by Field Division. It fits her taste in music, I think! (Because I am the biggest trash, I have made an Aisling playlist...it's good to write to. That song is on here: https://open.spotify.com/user/kammoody/playlist/3ppYC7BMxfimmE1Yb48sB7)
> 
> Credit for Steve's pet peeve (and subsequently Bucky doing it to Aisling not 5 seconds later) goes to my fabulous friend @tasteoftheusual over at the Tumblr. Your imagination gets me through.


	8. Chapter 8

_An old note in the Kymsa Jaala, “The Fifty Years,” a Sitorai script written during the First Siuvara and Tatuvara Conclave, the property of Yunara Ashara Siuvara III:_

_“My little one asked today, at five years old, why the symbol for the Darkness in this text is the Fire that Consumes because, and I quote, ‘Fire is so bright it makes my face itchy’, and I could not think of an answer that would satisfy her. Fire consumes, just as the Darkness does, and passion is a folly of many peoples. I told her that the itchy face part is the key. She looked rather bored by my explanation._

_Fire burns itself out. It consumes what makes it bright. I have found, for many years, parallels with these verses and the stories of the Humans. But for them, the fire never finds end. Even with death, many of their stories talk of the fire jumping to another. Revenge is a common tale. In other stories, it is called courage._

_I have asked Isamu if his people have old stories about fire as well. Indeed. One of their oldest is a story of a God who gave the humans…our quiet earthwalkers…fire, and suffered for eternity for it, even as his children found life._

_I am still thinking on that one."_

\--

Bucky yanks the cap on his head – familiar and foreign, an old habit, a new hat. Valleys rolling into nearby mountains. Ice on the stone step just outside the bar’s door. Cold mud, vaguely everywhere that cement isn’t. Old, dirt-colored buildings on a single pocked road, the only lights the three sets of stoplights and a few, twinkling corner lights, yellow as that old movie from the 80s he caught one time. These are the new variables.

Wanda’s hair is stuffed into a knit cap, the rest of it expertly plaited down her back. She casts Bucky a single glance, and then an imperceptible nod. She looks much younger without her battle armor of makeup. Aisling, her hair curled high to challenge God, eyes bright as amber, looks as she ever does – bizarre, ember radiance stuffed into a thick, awkward coat. Earlier, she kept looking at him like he was someone she’d never met, and it spooked him until she had whispered to him and Wanda back at the outskirts of town: “I rather like your hair pulled back. More people should see your face.”

He managed to stop himself from rolling his eyes, then, but now it feels more real. There are people inside. Anyone could see them – anyone could know.

Wanda pushes open the door and walks inside. Aisling follows after. He sighs quietly. He feels altogether too old for this act.

But he follows, carefully scanning the establishment for exits and bodies. A tall, black sign says “Please seat yourself.” The women linger in one spot, questioning, so he beelines for a booth in the dusty back corner. Not far from a TV, across from the bathrooms, blessedly warm in both wood color and temperature. Wanda’s head is down, focused, chatting quietly with Aisling (Something about the anchor on one of the TVs), but Aisling only looks to be half-listening, the way her head swivels on her neck like a goddamn searchlight.

He bites back a sigh, and searches far back in his head for the right tone. How would Bucky from 1938 distract a girl from messing up their mission? (None of those variables compute _together_ very well…) But as usual, his body finds the answer before his brain catches up. He says: “Lookin’ for someone, doll?”

Oops.

Aisling’s head whips around toward him, her mouth open and lopsided, a smile woven with horror. Wanda raises a brow at him. _Cool it_ , she mouths, but she’s reigning in amused shock at both Aisling’s reaction and the fact he said it at all. He shrugs mildly as Wanda slips into the booth, her back to the door. Aisling watches him as she pointedly slips in beside Wanda. He settles in assassin style, back to the wall, eye on the door, and looks over Aisling’s head as much as he can.

“Glare any harder and he might catch fire,” Wanda says cheerfully, setting her elbow on the table and her head on her palm.

“I’m not _glaring_ ,” Aisling hisses. He chances a glance at her face – and Aisling is half right. She’s not glaring, per say, so much as she is bare-faced _staring_ at him, mouth screwed up in confusion.

Well, he could relate.

“Doll is very much an old man thing to say, for the record,” she mutters, unable to meet his eye.

“I’m sorry. Honest,” he says softly, though he keeps his eye on the door now. He is not blushing. He is imagining things. “Just tryin’ to…act natural. I guess.” He flicks his eyes toward her. Her confused look lifts slightly. “And not have you bring down the attention of every single person in here.”

Wanda rubs her forehead with her palm. Aisling sighs deeply, but then she simply looks down at the table, uncharacteristically silent.

It is a Tuesday night, meaning the bar is busy but not crowded – a blessing and a curse. No one pays them any mind, minus a few glances upon entering, but it is rather small, with more light than he expected against its red-wood walls. It had at least looked _populated_ , which is more than he could say for most buildings in the town. He considers going up to the bar to get a drink, but he chooses to stay seated, mildly hiding under his hat, rather than face their questioning looks. Besides – alcohol didn’t do anything anymore, anyway.

He bites the inside of his cheek as Wanda speaks up. “Do you think the others will find us?” she asks.

Bucky feels an old kick in his heart, thinking of Steve and even Emma and Sam and T’Challa. They still had no real way of contacting them in a secure manner. If Tamryn had come after Aisling, it’s likely he and his odd squad lost interest in Wakanda pretty quickly for whatever reason. But the Avengers – or what was left of them – had handled much worse in the past (including himself, he remembered with a sour, annoyed note).

Fear…it was a potent weapon. Tamryn knew it.

Wanda stares, drifting, into the table pocked with years of abuse. Aisling’s face, he realizes too late, has turned icy and brittle.

“I left her behind,” she says softly, an echo of horror. _Emma._ “I will die if they are hurt.”

Pain spears him – from anyone else, he would write it off as dramatic overstatement. He thinks of Steve: _Keep them safe!_

_God, Steve, how could you expect this from me?_

Silence befalls them. All three are for a long moment buoyed only by stubbornness and the anxious bashing of their own thoughts. Exhaustion lines their faces so deeply, he is sure they look 10 years older than they actually are. For a moment, Bucky forgets why they ever moved at all, and they all stare at nothing, trying to forget the rest.

Until a waitress slinks to their table.

“Hey folks,” she says. She was older, thick in the middle with hard arms crossed over her chest. Her voice belied only small town politeness—not a whiff of the suspicion he was used to. He blinks up at her. Her face is the perfect smooth slate he’d only ever seen his relatives in Indiana perfect – slight smile, warm eyes bearing nothing. He feels panic rise in his chest like a gas flame. “What can I get you?”

Like pressing a switch, Aisling is suddenly…alive.

“Hello, darling,” the alien woman says. Her voice is smooth and sing-songy and bright. She glances at the woman’s name tag, ignoring the shocked glances both Bucky and Wanda shoot at her, and bears a blinding grin. “Gloria, yes? Is your kitchen still open? We’ve been hiking all day and we’re in later than we were expecting.”

Gloria smiled at Aisling and made a happy sound of assent as she offered up the menus. “Where y’all from?”

Bucky felt another stab of panic, but Aisling continued calmly, unfazed. “Quite far from here. Nebraska, actually.” She flashes Bucky a smile, as if to bolster him. “You’ll have to excuse us flatlanders…I hiked them to their limit I think.”

_Something like that._

Gloria, if possible, turns even more attention to Aisling. “Y’all are cornhuskers!” she says with a laugh. Bucky has no fucking clue what that means, but Aisling laughs cheerily, so he’s assuming it’s a good thing. “I have family in Iowa,” the waitress continues.

Aisling makes a clicking noise with her mouth and a pointy-gun with her fingers. He glances at Wanda, who glances back with wide eyes. _What the hell is happening?_ “Well, you shouldn’t have told me that! Now I have to impress you.”

He knows at one point in his life that he once was the character played by Aisling now, paired with a hopeless Steve. Now he’s barely keeping his mouth from popping open as Aisling schmoozes the waitress into bringing them three beers and three waters thanks to some old rivalry between two states that, at one time in his life, seemed as far away as London or Berlin.

“How old are ya, sweetheart?”

“Oh, Gloria. I’m 24.” Aisling extends a hand to Bucky and Wanda. “Couldn’t shake these two.”

Gloria softens even more ( _child_ , assassin instincts say, _she must have one around her age_ ), and sweeps away without even asking for their IDs, returning with their drinks before slipping away to let them look over the menus.

“Good heavenly father,” Wanda breathes. “It’s like we aren’t even here.”

Bucky stares. “Who are you, again?”

Aisling sips innocently on her water. “Did no one teach you manners, Mr. Barnes?”

But with company gone, she deflates immediately. Her eyes drop. Her hands are shaking a little. Where did that bright Aisling go when she was no longer needed?

 “You okay?” he asks.

“Worried,” she whispers into her glass.

“That’s what beer is for,” Wanda says. But he doesn’t miss the new way the woman looks at Aisling…like the alien girl had just opened up her skull for all to see.

Aisling at least pretends not to notice as she pulls out her familiar red pencil, now with bite marks. She begins to doodle on her napkin.

“Probably too much to think we got him,” Bucky says of Tamryn. He wraps his hand around his water glass, letting the condensation cool his palm.

Wanda sipped at her beer. “Would have been too easy.”

“He’s not dead,” Aisling says, voice flat. She doesn’t look up.

Wanda squints.

“I’ve never seen minds like those men before,” Wanda says quietly. “He…broke them, somehow. What can he do?”

Aisling visibly stiffens. Her curls fall to block her face. “He’s an anomaly,” she repeats.

“You’ve said that,” Wanda says slowly, casting Bucky a hard stare even as she turns her body toward Aisling.

Aisling is so pointedly not looking at him that her forehead almost touches the table. She is drawing lines back and forth on the napkin, dragging the flimsy paper. Her pencil accidentally tears a hole in her napkin, and her fingers tighten so hard, he expects to hear the wood crack.

“What does that mean?” Wanda says, pulling out of her bag, mysteriously, a permanent marker. She pushes it toward Aisling, and gently touches the other woman’s wrist. Aisling doesn’t seem to notice.

“How can we _stop_ him?” Bucky growls.

Wanda ignores him. “You can actually draw with this. Take it.”

Aisling doesn’t move. She shreds the napkin, further and further, until her pencil is against the wood grain.

Bucky resists the strong urge to reach out to her, but feels the tension building high. He works to keep his voice low. “Hey, Ash—”

Wanda glances at him, and he notices her eyes widen – a woman, watching as the axe falls – before she too looks back at Aisling and reaches out toward the young woman’s shoulders. “Aisling, take a deep breath,” Wanda manages, but then something in the air seems to shimmer for a moment, like the tension in the air is setting alight—

Aisling slams her hands against the table and throws her pencil against the table so hard it snaps.

Bucky leans backward by instinct, and grips the table with both hands now. “Aisling, what the hell—”

“Just stop!”

Her voice rings out like dropped silverware on stone. She notices too late the attention this will bring, and covers her eyes with one hand as bar patrons turn in their stools and booths toward them. Bucky pulls down on his hat bill and crosses his arms in front of his chest as he sinks into his seat as far as he can go. Wanda turns toward the table, placing her arms primly in front of her, staring at the wall next to Bucky, mouth pinned into a line.

 _He’s an anomaly._ Aisling repeats the words like a script, like she’s had to explain it so many times that it’s become both the armor and the weapon. She presses up against the topic, feet digging into the ground so she doesn’t fall into it, forever.

Bucky feels like hot glass dipped in cold water, rage on the verge of breaking through. Old emotions come back, screeching with rust. His human hand twitches and he squeezes his palm around his metal elbow _._ His careful control of the old, trapped Bucky Barnes, the one who used to fight bullies and snipe enemies beelining for Steve, has broken down, and the Brooklyn boy is itching to punch something. _Bucky, this isn’t your fight_ , he tries to remember, but at some point, it always becomes his fight – because motherfuckers in this world think they’re better than anyone else. _I’ll fucking show you what an anomaly is, asshole._

Gloria breezes to the table, smiling stonily as she tries to look casual. She looks rather pointedly at Wanda and Bucky. “Is everything okay here? Did you decide?”

Wanda’s mouth pops open and she turns toward the waitress with a completely forced smile. “Um—” she manages to squeak out, with a mottled blush, before Aisling’s hand comes from her face and reveals the coldest mask he’s ever seen her wear.

She’s smiling, all teeth. Gloria, at least, seems slightly comforted by it, but it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. There’s something unnatural about it, crawling on his skin.

“I’m so sorry. We’re so exhausted,” Aisling says, with a short, trilling laugh that makes him shiver. Wanda picks up her beer and starts chugging it. “Maybe just…three burgers. To go? Is that okay?”

“Oh, no worries. I’ll get that right in for you,” Gloria drawls in response. Her eyes linger on Aisling for a moment before she meanders away.

Aisling’s façade fades with chilling suddenness. Bucky feels the strong urge to get up and take a walk.

“Sorry,” she whispers. He sees two tears slide down her face before she wipes them away, as if they wouldn’t see them. “I almost messed it up.”

Wanda’s eyebrows knit together, like she’s solving a puzzle, but she places a comforting hand on Aisling’s shoulder. Her other hand is still firmly around her beer. “You’re okay.”

“No,” Aisling says shortly. "Listen. It's not that simple. We are  _both_ anomalies. Neither of us were anything our people had seen before. I tried to help him, because no one else wanted to…” She pins her mouth shut, like she’s afraid she will say too much. Her chin wobbles, but she forces the words out. “But then I pay for it, of course, because my people are strong and good but they have lost so much. Loss makes you wary…and loss makes you tired. And you don’t see it until it’s too late.”

Bucky feels himself leaning in closer and closer, until his elbows are on the table and his eyes are boring into her cheekbones because she won’t look either of them in the eye. She presses on, against this unspeakable thing, and gives it words. “He twists the way we communicate into a weapon. He could never perfect the art. He never could create the beauty of the way my people share thoughts, and he wanted it so much, if only so people would respect him. But the only thing he could see in turn was static. The only thing he could feel from others was what they feared most. Maybe we could have helped him. But then his mother died, his father fell into grief so deep he succumbed, his brother abandoned him with his own new wife – and we left him behind…”

Tears stream down Aisling’s cheeks. But she keeps going. Like she can’t stop. Both he and Wanda look afraid to touch her. Energy, invisible, seems to spark off her skin.

"No one else understood what it was like, to not truly be part of our people. I...I loved him. It made us both strong."

She puts a hand to her face.

“But there’s something broken in him. Something twisted and knotted so deep. Something wrong, wrong, _wrong_. He uses love as a tool. He doesn’t believe in it. I can’t believe he actually cares about anyone at all. Because then, once he has you, all you see is fear, all you feel is _fear._ And then, after that, he can twist a Sitorai body to do whatever he wants, a puppet.” She curses a word he doesn’t know, and clenches a fist. A Sitorai swear. “Those creature-men were once my people, and now they are nothing. He made them _nothing_. He’s gotten worse. He wants people to look at him and know that he stole everything they have, everything they know because he is _better_.”

She glares into the air between them, even as tears fall. She takes in a sharp breath. Her loneliness echos so strongly that it lingers in the air.

“He won’t stop until people respect him. But I don’t know what that even means. Because me, the half-creature, well that’s just very interesting isn’t it? He can’t make me fear him, because my mind is on the wrong frequency. That drives him crazy. But he still finds a way to control _my body_.”

Understanding hits Bucky so hard he loses his breath for a moment.

Aisling’s shoulders shake as she lays her head on the table. She’s trying to choke down a single keening sob and it comes out muffled from her throat and through her hands and her arms. Bucky wants to hit something so bad he can feel the vibrations through his metal arm. Yearning, angry pain. He knows the fear of control so well that he feels almost knocked over with how obvious her phobia is. How she tensed up whenever anyone came up behind her or restrained her, or the way she screamed after they parachuted from the sky…

_Something twisted and knotted so deep. Something wrong, wrong, wrong._

He wipes his hot and stinging eyes as he watches the entire bar turn on them. A poor girl, crying in the corner, with two assholes who didn’t know how to help her. Or, at least one asshole. Wanda is leaned in very close, whispering something to Aisling so softly he tries not to hear it.

But he hears everything. Including the TV, which has decided, at the least opportune time, to be extremely problematic.

“While there’s been no official word on the reason behind the double plane crash that killed five unidentified individuals in the Shenandoah National Park region,” the droning anchor announces, “investigators have revealed that the planes may be of Wakandan make, perhaps connected to the incident that occurred on a Wakandan landing pad two days ago…King T’Challa has not yet made official comment on the discovery.”

So he is alive. Right. Good. As expected. Bucky unclenches a little. But people are still staring, even Gloria, who looks vaguely like someone coming out of a fog.

He shoots a panicked glance at Wanda, who nods. Aisling is silent now but absolutely unmoving.

Wanda takes a well-folded wad of cash out of her boot -- that was something Steve taught her, he recognizes at once, because Steve still, to this day, refuses to leave the house without cash on him –- and places it on the table.

Bucky, as gently as he can, stands and places a hand on Aisling’s back. Her heart beats quickly within her chest, a fluttering bird. She blinks up at his face, her cheeks shiny, and he takes in a sharp breath.

The only way to solve a badly tied knot is to cut through it, and he’s not ready for the knife – he’s not ready for her to look at him and realize that someone opened him up and twisted him up inside, twisted him so bad that his lungs are bruised.

“I can walk,” she says. Her voice is utterly tapped out. He is no empath, but even he can tell – there is simply no more fight left in her body. He prepares himself to carry her out, despite it all.

But then she braces her hands against the table.

Her arms tense.

She slowly, slowly, pulls herself up to stand, a grim half-smile on her face, her eyes focused on something he can’t see. She turns out of the booth, and he gets out of her way as she stands up, faces the watching crowd, and walks, wobbly, down the aisle toward the door.

She marches away, toward the cold blowing in. Bucky recognizes it – a soldier, picking up, moving on.

Wanda gives him one last, alarmed glance, before she follows Aisling, close behind. He falls in beside Wanda. His arms waver in the air, afraid Ash will fall, afraid of where she may stop. Something in his heart burgeons, something akin to pride or astonishment, but it is swallowed up by the pulsing fear that something horribly, horribly wrong was happening.

Aisling sputters to a stop as Gloria steps in her path.

“Is everything all right?” Gloria asks. At first he thinks she is being polite, or hoping to keep her paycheck, and Wanda seems to agree. He swallows thick air down his dry throat as Wanda places a hand on Aisling’s shoulder. Aisling simply stares at Gloria.

“It’s been a long day,” Wanda says, surprisingly diplomatic. “Your payment is on the table.”

But Gloria puts herself between them and the door anyway, and does not stop staring Bucky down. Was he some creep, trying to take advantage of a young woman? Was Wanda complicit in some scheme? He could see the gears working in her head, and Wanda looks to be sputtering for anything to say. 

“What about the burgers?” Gloria asks.

“We are leaving,” Aisling says finally. Her voice is flat, but something else shimmers beneath it – the echo of a bell just rung. Wanda’s hand on her shoulder grips tighter, and he hears the woman whisper _don’t_ just as Aisling pushes past them all, wordless. Everyone is staring at them now. Everybody watches as Aisling walks out the front door, into the biting autumn chill, and leaves without another word.

Everybody, even Bucky, seems frozen in place – and everyone watches as Gloria’s face goes utterly slack.

The waitress falls down, unconscious.

A high-pitched sound rings in his ears as confused commotion explodes around them. Another waiter stumbles into their path, trying to wake Gloria. Bucky and Wanda burst out the door, leaving behind a growing uproar. Someone shouts _Hey!_ He ignores it.

They find Aisling walking quickly, but unevenly. He nearly breaks into a run to catch her. Wanda meanders behind, fingers twitching. _Bucky, wait_ she calls to him. He can’t wait. Aisling walks, seemingly without intent, toward the train station they’d spotted hours before, stumbling into the pools of yellow light.

It’s not until Wanda catches up and seizes his metal arm that he realizes – Wanda is _scared_.

That’s when Aisling collapses, unceremoniously, to ground.

“Ash!” Bucky shouts.

She falls to her knees, and then keels over her side, like a twist up doll that ran out of energy. Bucky leaps forward, and catches her before her head connects with cement. He puts his other arm under her knees and picks her up. No time to think about it.

He hears her breathing hitch. “I..I..” but she never finishes it. Her eyes roll back in her head.

“You’re fine,” he whispers, gruff. “Wake up, now. Come on.” He bites his lip. _This is not the right time to have an emotion, Bucky Barnes._ But it’s all too close to the surface, and her silence picked at his panic like salt to a wound. He gently bobs her up and down in his arms. _Wake up. Please._

He hears Wanda come up behind him. “Bucky. She did something back there.”

“We have to go.”

“Bucky—” But she stops at once, as soon as she turns him around. A hand flicks to her mouth, revealing weakness, before she steels herself again. “You’re crying,” she says.

He turns and walks away, holding Aisling tight to his chest.

_I tried to help him...but then I pay for it._

It’s only once the cold starts to bite his face, and they slip into the shadow of the forests, that he can feel the wet streaks, freezing in place. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was going to have more scenes in this chapter but then this happened...  
> Bucky's family being from Indiana comes from the great NotEnoughAnswers, whose fic, Gravity, is a Bucky/OFC must read. (Idk if it comes from actual comics!Bucky-canon but I really like it...being from Indiana myself ;) )


	9. Chapter 9

The sky is orange, and cinders fall from it like snow – as if the sky itself was set aflame.

Aisling’s eyes blur, her window to the world smothered in grease, and she blinks hard against the heat, against the fierce beating of her heart. A long moment passes, and then she sees: her father’s old farm house, ablaze in the night. The trees are blackened. She can sense no life.

Her mouth opens in shock and despair, and smoke fills her lungs. But she feels no press to cough. She is a ghost in this place, a vagary, both here and not, inexplicable, out of place. Her arms burn, as if marks have been seared onto her body, but when she looks down on herself, she sees only smears of soot in vague swirls across her forearms – half symbols, undone.

Perhaps she is already dead – the thought should inspire fear, but it feels blunted against her unknowing.

If everything she knew was on fire, death would be welcome, she thinks, for what would I have left to do? But then a figure, terribly familiar, stalks out of  the blaze, his beautiful eyes the very color of a flame’s heart devouring the earth, yellow and browns that are almost red, surrounded in a ring of green. His pale skin shows no sign of injury or burn, but his dimpled face is curled into a fearless snarl. His face, so deceptively soft on the edges, framed by thick eyebrows and a large nose, has lost any trace of the handsomeness he once effortlessly held in his youth.

Tamryn.

She knows now, why the fear was blunted.

It’s consumed by a vicious, thirsty _rage_.

“How could you do this?” she shouts. The air is thick, and she fears she cannot be heard. He stalks toward her. Her feet are planted to the ground, but her fists curl so tight she feels her nails pierce her palm. She glares defiantly at him.

_If I have lost everything, he can’t hurt me any more than he already has._

His thick lips smear around his words, his voice unsettlingly quiet. “How could _I_ do this?” he says. “How could you abandon me?”

The rage unfurls like a blossom, and an unearthly shriek escapes her throat. “You destroyed me!” she screams. But it’s not enough.

Suddenly, he is right in front of her. A terrible smile creeps across his face. His thick, dark hair, still short but sticking up out of the top of his head, is blown back the inferno. “You are just like me, love,” he says. “We’re in this together. You were just too afraid, before.”

She is silent for a moment, and he laughs, sick.

“You did this,” he whispers, profane and intimate. “The flame that consumes.”

No.

She shrieks. And shrieks. The rage won’t die. No matter what, her Sitorai control and teachings won’t kick in, like she’s broken through a barrier and there’s no more friction to stop her from gaining speed. She has been wronged. Everything, taken from her, all at once, because of old fear and ancient loneliness. The loneliness will never fade. But the fear is consumed in the flame.

_I will never be that girl again._

She throws a punch at his face, and watches realization dawn in his eyes.

\--

_Hours earlier_

Bucky knows he is tired, knows he hasn’t slept well his entire life, knows that even the fairly light Aisling is starting to weigh on his arms and shoulders. He holds her even tighter as he negotiates over an exposed root, and his biceps scream a little. Only his preternatural grace allows him to keep up with a spooked Wanda.

But he also knows that, for at least this moment, he is the master of his fear.

“Wanda,” he says, willing his voice out to her. They managed to get away from the town, away from searching eyes and the sirens of emergency personnel…whatever Aisling did, no one even thought to come after them once they had spirited away, but he can’t think about that, or he’ll be as afraid as Wanda. “Wanda, stop.”

She keeps moving, over foliage and dead things in the dark, the only light coming from the snapping fires of her power, moving objects out of her way. But before he can call out to her again, she stumbles to a stop in a clearing and bends over, breathing heavily, one hand on her knee, the other on her face. When she’d heard the sirens, she jumped so hard – even harder than him – he half-expected to hear some of her bones crack before she had turned and bolted further into the forest, almost out of his sight.

But he has to give her credit. By the time he reaches the clearing, she is already unfurling a bedroll to place Aisling upon.

“Okay,” he grunts as he places Aisling down. “What’s happening?”

“Did we lose the sirens? I—” Wanda seems to lose the words as soon as they come. She begins to pace.

“They never followed us,” he says flatly. Her pace stumbles for a moment, at that.

He sits beside the bedroll and glances upon Aisling’s face, allowing his eyesight to adjust to the moonlight the clearing provides. A sweaty sheen covers her forehead, and her face is twitching, as if in a dream.

He reaches a fearful hand toward her face, and rests three fingers on her brow. He leaves them there, against her clammy skin, for only five seconds – he counts them – before he pulls back, slowly. Not a fever then, at least.

Right.

“Bucky, who _is_ she?” Wanda says, all of a sudden. She paces right up beside him, and stares down at him with an uncomfortably scanning look.

His mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out. Frustration builds, though he can’t quite place why. “Why?”

Wanda places a hand on her face and takes a deep breath. She then nods once. “I can’t believe I never noticed it until now. I can’t _believe_ —” She suddenly sits down right beside him, staring down at Aisling’s prone form with an unreadable look. “I should have had known when she explained her people’s power.”

“What?”

He catches it now – her eyes are compassionate, but her mouth is pinned in a hard line. “She’s…well she’s not like them. She’s like me…there’s something external, in the way her mind works. But instead of moving objects, she can…” Her hands flutter in the air. “There’s a magnetism to her. So subtle. I wouldn’t even have thought to notice if she hadn’t…transformed like that. You know what I mean.”

His blood turns to ice water.  He doesn’t even want to entertain this idea, but he has to. “She can do more than she said?”

Wanda puts her hands out in a supplicant gesture before letting them fall back to her sides. “I don’t think even _she_ knew. She…I could see it happen. The force of her will…it came out from her, like a…like an arc of electricity, and made the waitress’s brain…short out, almost. It echoed so strongly I almost felt it myself.” She gently touches Aisling’s face, moving a single curl out of her eyes. “But it clearly took it out of her. The energy.”

Bucky stares off into nothing, trying to regain composure.

“There’s likely more to this,” she says, quieter than before. “She asked me what my power looks like. To my own eyes. I didn’t know what to say.”

But he can’t even think of that. _More_. All he can think of is her magnetism, how subtle it is, and whether he’s been a fool this entire time. If he fell for it. If he’s truly hopeless, or more likely, an idiot for even considering...

“Is she real?”

Wanda looks at him then, her mouth turned downward. She is sympathetic, and that bothers him even more, especially as she stumbles out a response. “Most of her. I don’t know. The sadness, the anger, the…loneliness, the—” She stops herself. She gives him a mysterious once over, but she doesn’t finish it, whatever it is. His stomach flips.

Their odd…friendship or connection or _whatever_. _I’m like you._ Perhaps it truly was something he had imagined, and he can’t decide between relief or despair. He’s so deeply annoyed by the arguing of his emotions that he has to stand up and look away, as if keeping watch into the shadows. Wanda stands, too, and places a light hand on his shoulder.

“I read her intent before she collapsed,” she says softly. “She did it to keep us safe. Whatever she can do…I think she meant it. Everything she said to us.”

She comes around his side.

“She barely even knows us,” Wanda says. “But I felt no lie. And I know you haven’t, either.”

He crosses his arms tightly across his chest. Wanda was likely right, and as much as he was afraid to admit it, he had never witnessed her lie before, not even in the restaurant. Even then, nothing she had said had technically been a lie.

But at least he would have known what to do with a lie. He had a protocol, these days, for people who meant him ill or wished to trick him.

He thinks of Steve – the only person he can remember who never lied to him or used him.

The protocol for truth is still developing.

\--

Aisling’s eyes flew open. She took in a sudden breath, shocked and calmed by the coolness of the air.

A dream.

But not like the others. Not at all like the others. She sat up and brought her hands to her lap. The bloody, crescent moon marks of her nails were still laid in deep in her palm, though her knuckles were clear, unbruised. In the dream, she could move. She could act. She hadn’t been running, but standing. Though she had clearly been frozen with despair, the rage was…well, it had always been there, vaguely, she realized, but never like that. Never all-consuming, never _powerful_.

It’s heavy to remember.

But she wished she remembered punching him.

“Hey,” came a voice from beside her. She looked over to Bucky, who was watching her from five feet away, sitting up in a half c-shape, a few squares of paper near him.

More memories came rushing back.

She put a hand up to her face, and was helpless as she remembered. Helpless, as Bucky watched her with renewed…suspicion.

“Are you—?” he began, a question hanging in the air, and she couldn’t bear to have him finish it.

“I’m me,” she said, voice shaky.

 “Do you remember what happened?” he asked.

 “Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

How easily it came to her, exactly what the woman wanted to hear. Aisling loved the intricacies of people, how certain words pressed certain buttons and could lead them to happiness or joy, into the correct memories or right feelings, away from the pull of darker things and the easy slip into the ‘despair spiral,’ as Emma once called it.

But now she wanted to stuff her mouth and eyes with cotton. It was sickeningly, ironically familiar. How cleanly and precisely Aisling had been pressing, up until the very end, where she pressed so hard the woman broke. She was tired, she needed to _get out_ and old barriers fell, and the usual brightness she felt around others had become keen and digging as an arrow, so she let it fly. She’d never felt so out of control. A defense mechanism acting without her permission.

It may have saved them. But it might have ruined everything.

Bucky’s silence was damning.

“I know what I did,” she said slowly. “I…know what happened. But please. Bucky. I would never do that to you. Never ever ever _ever_.”

His eyes were barren, pinning her with what she could only describe as isolation. Words poured out as if a dam had broken. “Please understand. I don’t even know…I shouldn’t have done that back there, and I’ll pay for it later, I’m sure, somehow.  I didn’t even know I could do it. I just wanted to keep her or any of them from looking at you or Wanda so _badly_ —”

“It’s okay,” he said gruffly. His unbreakable face finally flickered into a deep frown, and only then did she catch a sense of all the trouble roiling under its icy surface. “Just go back to sleep.”

“No,” she said. “Let me stay awake. It’s my turn to watch, I’m sure.”

But this didn’t lend him any comfort. He fidgeted where he sat with an unusually youthful energy – a young man who didn’t know how to sit still.

“I was worried,” he said. He said it so fast that it took her a moment to even realize he said anything coherent. He took in a deep breath and tapped the ground with his fingers. “I was worried about _you_.”

She blinked. She understood at once the emotional capital it took for him to even admit such a thing, and she was so moved by this progress that she angrily rebuked herself until the very notion of bursting into tears was pushed far back into her mind.

Instead, she stood and moved her sleeping bag two feet closer to him and sat on it.

“Oh Christ,” he muttered. But he didn’t move away. He turned on his mat so he wasn’t facing her, as if to give her more room, and continued to look at and poke the ground.

Her eyes darted around. Where to look? “I’m figuring it out.” It was a slight lie, but it doesn’t feel completely untrue, either. “It is odd. I know who I am. I know what I feel. But I also…don’t know. I’ve never had reason to…” She stumbles midsentence at the heat of her own face. “I’ve never had reason to push at the Light, to see what I can do, not even in Wakanda, not since Tamryn…” She flicked her fingers in the air to define all the things that could entail, and took a deep breath to steady herself. “If I have to fight him, I will. Whatever it takes to keep you…and Wanda and my family safe. I don’t care. I’ll make that sacrifice.”

She realized what she meant as she spoke, but it felt so intensely true, she didn’t care. She looked up to the sky for a moment, sending her thoughts to the stars, defiant. _I will break all of our rules. Tamryn does not follow them, and to stop him, someone will have to break in turn._ She expected her mother would have a philosophical argument against this, but she felt, in some way, that her father would have done the same thing. Fight so that others did not have to. She would protect her people – and Bucky – from that.

She looked down toward Bucky, and saw the way he was staring at her.

He looked…well, to be honest, she couldn’t quite place it, not even from his topical emotions. The closest thing she could puzzle out was…curiosity, mixed with skepticism and melancholy.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

She laughed at that. It was rather unexpected.

“I’m serious.” And he did, in fact, look rather serious. “Last time I said that to Steve he became goddamn Captain America.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

She could see he was remembering something, the way he stared off into nothing for a moment. “He broke into a HYDRA prison to save my sorry ass.”

“I know,” she said. “Everyone knows that.” Sometimes she forgot this was the same Bucky Barnes discussed in the human social studies classes she took. She tried very hard not to think about that.

“Oh, great. Well.” A sheepish smile flashed across his face. “Don’t do that.”

Her heart climbed up her throat, but she didn’t mind it, oddly. “No promises.”

His smile faltered, and a seriousness entered his eyes. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

His words seemed to linger in the air for a moment. She kept up appearances, and cast him a mischievous eye. But she also knew exactly what she would do in such a scenario, and knew he would not like it one bit. It wasn’t about _proving_. It just was. “Don’t get captured by anyone.”

He put a hand on his face, and took a moment before he responded. “I’m done here.”

“HYDRA will rue the day.”

“Ash.”

“I’d be great at infiltrating. I make a rather convincing human being, as you might know.”

He made an annoyed, growly sound as he lied back down on his sleeping bag, and muttered something along the lines of _go away_ , but she knew he didn’t mean it, which was new. Something in his heart shimmered before her for a moment – something fragile, beset on all sides by fear.

It made her heart beat so fast she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t bear to think of what it all meant – her experience in this area was short and broken. She swallowed down the anxiety that spiked so hard she wanted to throw up.

She kept her watch. She let the moon and stars wash over her as she recalled her dream, the odd burning on her arms, the rage, and tried to distill it down into something useable. A strength she could access. Because she knew now that the possibilities were expanding. They were stretching out before her, a road into midnight and beyond.

She took out the marker Wanda had slipped into her bag, and considered alternatives to rage and to fear.

Almost without thinking, she began to draw the swirls of her favorite motif on her arm.

_Shield._

\--

Aisling kicked and stone, and sent it flying. She walked beside Wanda, whose mouth was turned downward in focus and frustration.

“You have to actually _try_ , Barnes,” Wanda said, voice shimmering with annoyance.

“I _am_ trying.”

“His brain is made of bricks,” she muttered to Aisling.

“I can hear you.”

A day or two had passed since the incident at the bar. It had taken them about as long to find the tracks again, it felt like, and since they blew their chance to gather supplies at the last time, they were beginning to consider the possibility that they could run out of food at some point. They three required quite a bit of calories, Aisling thought ruefully.

So they distracted each other by attempting to do the thing they were brought together for in the first place: fixing Bucky’s memories.

Alas, so far, Wanda was painfully correct. It was akin to breaking through a brick wall – as if someone, perhaps Bucky himself, had expected a break-in and sought to keep out whoever would attempt any sort of repair.

 _It was close._ Aisling heard Wanda’s voice whispering inside her ear, right next to her brain, as breathy and real as if she had spoken aloud. _I could see it._

 _Flashes of a tainted thing._ Aisling flicked her eyes at Wanda. _I felt it, too._

Aisling looked askance to their other companion and jumped a little, noticing Bucky staring at her.

“What?” she stammered out.

His eyes widened a little. Caught in the act. His brow furrowed. “You were talkin’ about me behind me back.”

“No!” Aisling said, altogether too quickly.

“Your eyes go out of focus,” he said definitively. “I can tell.”

“If only you could be as perceptive while we’re trying to do the actual thing,” Wanda said, frowning. Bucky’s eyes flattened, but he said nothing.

Such was the pattern of the past day. Waiting until Bucky would let them in. Wanda, hunting explicitly through photos of the past. Aisling, sifting through their emotions, their Trueness, which she could not explain, even to Bucky, in words that would let him understand.

_It’s the trueness of the thing. No fuzziness of falsehood, no glassed-over din._

Bucky had stared at her hard when she said that. She understood. How could he feel for such a thing, when most all memories felt straight out of an oil painting? The trouble with years in cryostasis: there was very little to use as a basis for everything else.

She was afraid to ask him the most important question: What felt True, right now?

“Over there,” Bucky said suddenly. “An old platform.”

He started toward it, to where the train tracks would inevitably, hopefully, be – not another set of abandoned ones.

Aisling pulled her coat closer as they hiked on. She couldn’t seem to keep the cold away, even with the sun overhead. It bit at her cheeks and threatened to freeze her limbs in place, even as Bucky and Wanda strode forward like gods of winter. She praised the Stars for her boots, which Wanda had stuffed with pieces of the ripped parachute to try and give her more padding and warmth, and for the large, ugly coat, and for the fact that she had opted for pants on the day of their escape. She tried to be thankful.

Her jaw hurt from how hard she was trying not to shiver out loud. Her breath came out in little white puffs. But she welcomed it – a distraction from her skittery brain, afraid of her effect on her friends, even more afraid to lose them. Where did that leave her, but in a nowhere place?

Bucky waved her over to the platform. She placed a hand on his shoulder and then nodded at him. In a single, swift motion, he kneeled down, set his hands under her foot and almost threw her onto the top of the platform. She squeaked as she belly-flopped onto the stone.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

“Me too,” she said. Dust and dirt scratched at her cheek.

She shakily stood up, moving away as Bucky pulled himself up and Wanda gracefully jumped to the top, easy as a cat. Aisling’s eyes drifted over the train tracks that seemed to go on forever, deep into the forest and the mountains. For a panicky moment, she wondered if these tracks were also abandoned. This electric station, at least, looked out of sorts, but there were electric lines above her head, crossing over top like vines, and a light down the way that shone a flat white.

She took a deep, steadying breath, thinking about how far away everything felt. She tried to pull it all inward. It wasn’t working.

“Alright, trouble,” Bucky said. She started a little at his voice, just over her shoulder. “You owe me a match.”

She turned, but did not need to turn far. He was unusually close to her. Her blood drained out of her face.

“I don’t feel like it.”

“You landed a few blows on me last time.”

It’s true, she allowed, but he had almost certainly let her do it. She squeezed her hand into a fist, then relaxed it. Let the feelings go.

But she could not. The doggedness of the anxiety. It clung to her like sticky wrap, thoughts she couldn’t quite process flying out of her head before she could discern why they made her uncomfortable. Bucky was too close to her.

“It’ll at least warm you up a bit,” Wanda said, setting her pack down a few feet away.

“We didn’t make much progress today,” Aisling said. She was shocked at the bitterness in her own voice. Bucky, too, seemed to sense something was off. He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Punching him may make you feel better,” Wanda said, putting a hand on her hip. Bucky, Aisling noted, was looking elsewhere, as if he had removed himself from the conversation.

His unreadable expression felt like the last dust mote on a pile of bad things, ready to break through an old net. The ropes were fraying and breaking. She couldn’t hold this all in at once. _There’s nothing to be sorry for_ , Wanda had assured her, wordless, but she couldn’t shake the niggling feeling in her head that something had passed them all by back at the bar, and she was the only one left behind. She was afraid of when the end of the journey would come, and they would leave. She was afraid the journey would never end, and she’d never see Lomora again, and they would die out here for nothing. She was afraid she was accidentally hiding more of herself from them, without even knowing. She was afraid they’d let her go.

But what she hated most was this: that Bucky was at the center of it. It was of her own doing, this mess, and now she was mucking through it.

“Okay,” Aisling managed, instead. “Let’s go.”

Bucky snapped to attention and nodded, biting his lip. He fell instantly into a fighting stance, fists up, knees slightly bent. “Keep your hands in front of your face this time,” he said, voice low.

Aisling rolled up her sleeves slightly, to enable movement.  She put her own hands up, slowly, the way Uncle Travis and Emma had taught her, and ignored Wanda’s searching stare.

She moved forward. _Bucky won’t even use his metal arm and I’ll still end up on the ground_ , she thought miserably. In fact, he avoided using his metal arm so much that it should have been a liability, something for her to use against him, but he was built for this and she was a stumble-y daughter of a people who believed even mentioning war could bring it down upon them, so they weren’t exactly evenly matched.

 _You can do it._ She heard Wanda, watching closely from the side. _Surprise him._

Her heart beat so fast. She remembered her dream, and the way she surprised Tamryn, how she channeled the rage and threw her arm toward his face–

But it didn’t help.

She looked at Bucky, his chiseled cheekbones, his flatlined mouth, his serious eyes, grey as a storm, belying something else, and she very much again wanted to throw up. Her stance collapsed. She turned away at once.

Even conflating those images…Tamryn and Bucky, together…

The very thought threatened to pull her apart, bit by bit.

Suddenly Wanda was beside her, hand around Aisling’s wrist.

“It’s all right,” Wanda said, loud enough for Bucky to hear.

But it was conspiratorial. She gently pulled up a little more on Aisling’s sleeve, revealing the drawings from the night before. The ink was slightly smudged, but largely preserved against her dark skin. Wanda watched her calmly. Of course she had seen them – no wonder she had been watching Aisling so intensely. Was she waiting for an explanation, or using it to show her strength?

Aisling yanked her wrist away and pulled the sleeve down. She shook her head. _Oh, Wanda, it won’t help me here. It can’t._

Because, right then, Bucky walked over. He carefully placed a hand on her shoulder, for a single moment, and she heard him say something about _Later, we’ll try again later_ , but she didn’t know for sure because his thumb had lingered there, on her shoulder for another moment before it brushed an errant curly hair away. Because Wanda touched her other shoulder, steady as stone, believing in Aisling because it meant there was hope for her, too. Because Aisling was caught by the urge to bolt – another nowhere place, but even more desperate, because she knew what it meant.

Love stabbed her, right in her chest.

Right there, where she thought she’d burned it out.

It felt like fear. Drifting out in an icy lake, alone.

Hoping someone would come along with her. Afraid that they would.

A train’s horn wailed. The ground shook.

The true tests were coming. She felt it, sure as the keening train. The line would be drawn. Soon, she would know where her heart should be – like it or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My update schedule is likely gonna be once a month now, maybe twice. Like a goddamn comic...lmao.
> 
> (shit gonna start goin down next chap...just wait.)


	10. Chapter 10

Emma sits.

  
She doesn’t feel good for much else. Sitting. Waiting. God, praying…she tries to imagine Aisling’s face as she tells the alien girl once again about what they have dubbed The God Problem. Who is God to her people? What does God mean now that aliens are a thing? Emma imagines Aisling’s slight, bemused smile, dark eyebrows cocked, slight stars in her skin. “That again?” she’d say. “Can we think about just right now, please?”

  
It makes everything worse.

  
Because Emma, once surrounded by literal aliens, is now surrounded by people she once only saw on TV. Steve Rogers: Blond, blue-eyed, built in a lab, unnaturally smooth edges, very likable, very much a mess. Sam Wilson: Calm, cool, no sweat on his brow, somehow still able to cajole with Steve, face otherwise unreadable. She admires his grit. On the video call, King T’Challa: Familiar in his steadfastness and warm demeanor, but he is calling from the land where yes, he is the king. Was he ever really that familiar?  
Then there was Emma: Girl from the lands of corn. She has a belt in Aikido. That’s about it.

“You still can’t find them?” That is Steve. Sharp and choppy.

“No.” That is the flat, nigh sarcastic tone of Tony Stark – a man she never liked on TV, and a man she only liked slightly more over video call. No. He can’t find them. Ash is still out there. With a brainwashed super soldier she barely knew and some woman they call the Scarlet Witch completely unironically.

“I keep running the programs,” Stark continues. He is tired – his words clip so hard his breath comes out in huffs sometimes. “Dead ends. Everywhere.” A muttering: “Wouldn’t be so hard if Banner hadn’t decided to go on vacation.”

Awkward silence follows.

Emma knows that history hangs heavy between Rogers and Stark. She’s seen it before. Two men both owe each other, but neither knows who owes more. They can’t talk about it. She doesn’t know why. Men.

“Well, what now?” Steve asks. It’s quiet. Emma glances at Sam. Why does he let Steve lead? Steve is…useless about this.

“Vision is looking,” Stark says. Right. Another alien type. He’s under supervision and also useless. Natasha has apparently “been informed.” Emma openly rolls her eyes. No one says anything about it.

  
“This is not enough.” The cool voice of Lady Yunara Siuvara – Aisling’s mother – comes through, sharp as fresh ice. Emma can practically feel the growing chill from Lady Yunara’s video connection. She has the same deep, warm skin as Aisling, but even darker, almost onyx in color. Her eyes are an unnaturally bright gold, and her hair is wrapped in bright red silk. She is loving, angry, absolutely calm. She is brittle and unflappable. Emma can’t help but feel some schadenfreude in some respects for how the Avengers must feel in her presence. Men like this – men with power – should squirm a little.

And then they should find Aisling.

“I’m coming to you, Mr. Stark,” Lady Yunara continues. “Deny me again if you like. I’ve already tracked the connection. And I imagine a man like yourself will be easy to pick out in a crowd of a million minds.”

She smiles darkly.

Ash definitely got her dramatic side from her mother, for the record, but Yunara uses it to such sleek effectiveness that Emma has to smile, if only for a moment. Stark wisely says nothing. He just stares into the nothing – into his camera but at no one.

Lady Yunara, then, breaks a little. Her lips quivers. She nods to someone off camera, likely one of her advisors. Emma realizes: This is the falling pile of a thousand mistakes. But whose?

No one blames Ash. Or Bucky. But they are all here, waffling.

She finds that curious and maddening.

“You truly have nothing?” The calm voice of T’Challa, rimmed with annoyance. “I find that a little hard to believe. Even our scans had revealed a possible presence the day of the plane crash.”

Stark touches his face for a moment. He needs coffee.

“Indeed,” Lady Yunara says. “How are they avoiding you?”

“I don’t know.” Stark is coolly polite. “I have theories. About your daughter, about the creeps Steve described, about your people. Nothing useful. So far, everything points to them being alive. They just don’t want to be found.”

“Are they being followed?” Blessed Sam. “We were.”

“Yeah,” Stark says. “Very likely. And yes, Cap, before you ask, yes. I’m trying to track the baddies. These aliens are doing some weird shit to my scanners.”

“Are they alive?” Desperate Steve.

“Look.” Tony wants to snap, but he holds on. “I don’t know. They were yesterday – I saw some familiar energy blips. Maybe. In a sea of weird shit.”

Yesterday.

Maybe.

“And we’re just gonna fly around like a bunch of dumbasses?”

Emma says it before she can stop herself. The men all look at her. She sees Lady Yunara’s face soften immediately, but instead of comfort her, it just makes her want to cry.

“Emma, are you all right?” the Queen asks at once. She’s asked the Avengers multiple times to bring Emma home, directly to her, but they both know Emma’s place is here. But

Emma can’t take this. She can’t take the frustration.

Emma clenches her fists. “Just do something. Anything.”

She walks as far back into the aircraft as she can get, in the most secluded corner that she can, and she stuffs a pillow over face as they fight and chatter and yell in the background.

Just fucking find her.

Just fucking do it.

Gods among men and they are all fucking useless.  
\--

It happened. They jumped. Aisling could barely think of it—the insanity of it, the exact way Wanda figured out which car to jump onto, the fact they were trying this at all.

“Hold tight,” Bucky said. He held Aisling by the shoulders. He held on tightly enough for two people, so she found his instruction unnecessary. A ribbon of his hair drifted toward her cheek as the billowing wind picked up just before the train blew by.

"We don’t have to—”

“It’s all right,” he said.

The coming train screeched with such might. Her body rumbled. The leaves trembled. She knew his legend. His phobia was so palpable in the air that she knew his legend was true – not just history, prettied up. He did fall off a train and then ended up, in the long scheme of things, right here, so she certainly understood his trepidation.  
She wanted to tell him that he was right – it would be all right.

But then they were shoved into the air.  
\--  
_You could have warned me!_

Wanda laughed.

_You don’t get that in a fight._

Wanda, Aisling found, liked to tease – but it always hid something else. It was Wanda that shoved them toward the train midsentence. It was Wanda who picked them up, dusted them off – Aisling always thought that was just a saying, but now they were all marked by the black sludge-ash that painted the bottom of the train. Wanda was always moving. Wanda was always pushing.

Aisling recognized this behavior. This was a woman trying to find her place again. This was a woman for whom stopping meant thinking, and there’s no room for that right now. There were always small ways to heal people, her mother always said, and sometimes it involved letting Wanda wipe the floor with you in a fight.  
Wanda’s magic felt like the moment before a fire starts – the billowing heat seconds before it combusts. For a moment, it is soft and warm, the white light of a child’s sparkler. She’s careful and taut.

“Come on, try again,” Wanda said. “You’re a lot more fun than Clint.”

Who?

“You just like beating me up,” Aisling said instead.

Wanda laughed. Aisling heard it now. It’s wild and it’s longing and it’s waiting…for a place, somewhere. What do you do when you lose your other half? And then, after that, when your shaky little answer gets wiped away in an instant?

Wanda swung another punch.  
\--

This was when it started to feel unreal.

Aisling wasn’t bad at sparring, they found out eventually. Emma had trained her for more than simply punching. She was good at dodging and liked to use people’s weight against them to make them trip rather than swing any punches herself. It was an especially useful tactic on a moving train car.

Bucky didn’t fight. He pointedly made jaded, grumpy calls from the side, and for a while, she was concerned he would freeze solid sitting there. Wanda tried to cajole him into fighting Aisling once, but the odd guilt that rattled his body at that moment made Aisling’s vision shake for a second. She couldn’t pin down the source of his guilt, so the weird anxiety lingered in her gut unanswered for more than a few rounds.

Instead, he made them fight and train until they were sweating and Aisling could do little but gasp on the filthy floor of their “cabin”.

“I’m dying,” she said dramatically. She was play-acting, of course, but lying there, watching Bucky’s form while her head lay against the floor, she realized it would be convincing. Her dark hair was flat against her skull in some spots, while wildly poofy in others, giving her the look of a molting chicken. Dirt encrusted her nails and dusted her face with a gray etherealness. She was wrapped in a stiff, filthy coat, but her hands were impossibly cold against the brown-black floor. She never wanted to move again.

If she didn’t, no one would ever find her.

“You said you wanted to fight the bad guys,” Bucky said. His tone reminded her of Uncle Travis, sitting on his porch reading The Lomora Register while calmly, benevolently instructing Emma and her how to dig a garden properly. _You said you wanted strawberries this year._

She expected Wanda to laugh – instead, she gently helped Aisling off the floor moments before a massive bump shook the car.

“Enough for today,” Wanda said. Aisling sat against the wall opposite Bucky. Wanda sat down right beside her. She looked at Aisling the way a person does when considering a new solution to a puzzle.

“You’re too stubborn,” Wanda said. “You could have said stop earlier.”

Aisling was still breathing heavily. “Bucky is trying to kill me.”

Wanda smiled. “Maybe.”

Bucky said nothing. As usual, Wanda knew more than she would ever say.

Sitting, Aisling considered sleeping – there was little else to do to make the cold go away – but then she was drifting and the decision was made for her.  
\--

“How long was I out?”

“An hour,” Wanda said. She jerked her head toward Bucky. “Long enough for him to pass out, too.”

It was weird moments like this that she felt utterly trapped by the consequences of her stupid decisions. She felt the panic build just beneath her heart, a leaky faucet filling up her ribcage. How long would they be on this train? Bucky can’t do this. She can’t. She’s torturing them.

Wanda squeezed Aisling’s hand. She jumped a little.

“Don’t panic,” Wanda said. “We’re all fine.”

Aisling nodded slowly. The air shifted, suddenly.

“I know I push people out,” Wanda said. “I don’t mean to.”

“I know.” Aisling stared at her knees. “This is all kind of weird.”

Wanda frowned. She watched a piece of dust roll across the floor, straight for Bucky’s nose.

“It’s nice having someone who can read my thoughts back to me for once.”

“I only make good guesses.”

Wanda squashed the dust mote with her foot just before it reached Bucky’s face.

“Better than nothing,” Wanda said.

Aisling turned toward the woman. Her face was so young. The TVs never caught that. Maybe Wanda meant that on purpose. Maybe she was tired of people thinking she was a

victim, even though the other side of that coin wasn’t much better.

“You would fit in at home better than I would,” Aisling said.

She felt Wanda’s gaze turn toward her, but Aisling closed her eyes.  
\--

This may be the most unreal of all.

Aisling was awake. Bucky was awake. This apparently calmed him to some degree. He was morosely sketching on crumpled pieces of paper. He leaned over them intently, eyes squinting.

“Do you want help?” she asked.

He hesitated, as he always did. She asked the question even though she always knew the answer. This was a form of insanity, she thought darkly.

“Alright,” he said.

She startled at that.

“You asked,” he muttered.

Aisling shuffled next to him. She rolled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around herself as she squinted out the slight crack of the train car door. She watched speckled snowfall and dark trees blur by. The car thumped in a careful rhythm. The metal boxes clang ruefully.

“You never let me help,” she said. “And now I don’t know what to do.”

“Join the club.”

“Heh. What are you working on?”

He put it down and stared at nothing for a moment. “Not sure.” And then, quieter: “I’m remembering.”

Aisling glanced down at his papers. They were not drawings, but words and phrases, written in a spidery handwriting that tumbled across the page. She recognized the script but couldn’t read it. It’s in Cyrillic.

“What does it mean?” she asked softly. She thought of his face when he saw her Sitorai script for the first time. Open, curious, hopeful, always desperate for something – some meaning where perhaps none would be.

“They’re…places. Names of places, maybe cities.” He bit his lip. “I don’t think they’re good places.”

“HYDRA?”

“Would make sense, wouldn’t it?” He side-eyed her. “But one of these is…well its Russian words, but I’m damn near 100 percent sure it’s right here in our backyard.”

Aisling let the air huff out of her mouth. “Well, everyone knows now that HYDRA was…around.”

His eyes searched the air. “This one.” He pushed a piece toward her. More rune-like, square-shaped script she couldn’t read. “I remember flat fields. Green soybeans growing nearby. A copse of trees…old trees. And a junky building, some old farm depo remade into…something. Two stories tall and three underground levels.” His face hardened. “Very middle America.”

Aisling smiled distantly. “That could be middle anywhere, Bucky.”

“Yeah. I dunno. Why am I remembering it now?”

“Brains are weird, darling,” she said softly. She tilted her head against her knees so she could watch him better. “It’s been a weird time.”

He stared askance at her for a long moment, mouth twitching. He couldn’t shake his trepidation, no matter how long he sat, thinking it through. He can’t stay still. And now there’s something else…

“Yeah,” he said.

He fell silent and went back to his papers.

She bit the inside of her cheek in order to not sigh aloud. He was trying. So was she. Sometimes it didn’t feel like enough. Sometimes her heart screamed at her to do something else, anything else.

There was nothing else. They just had to get to the middle, somehow. Meet there together.  
\--

Fucking trains.

Bucky can’t get the thought out of his head. He stays close to the door so the women don’t have to. A pointless show of chivalry that’s made Wanda give him annoyed looks more than a few times, but it’s either be stupid or feel useless, and useless is out of the question.

He’s awake and Aisling is asleep. His shoulder aches from the cold of his metal arm, but rubbing it doesn’t seem to help anymore. He’s torn between watching over them, in their small, unlikely space where they each have like a 5-foot wide space to themselves, or forgetting and sleeping so he wouldn’t be responsible if something happens. Aisling has a term for that type of thinking, but he doesn’t care.

He glances at the growing nest of papers around her. Aisling once again fell asleep mid-doodle. It was too cold for anything else. He gets a flash of a memory: Steve, small, with a doctor’s report he doesn’t want Bucky to see. Asthma, allergies, various other diseases he couldn’t name. He never let anyone know, until the army found out in the 40s.

Ash would do something like that. She would. She tries to hide the doodles on her arms from him, a shame he both understands and is mystified by. What does it mean when you mark yourself? That seems like a lined crossed, a heightened need.

Fucking trains.

These thoughts don’t make any sense.

“She’s fine.” Wanda is staring at him from across the train car, meaning she is like 5 feet away, basically. Bucky just closes his eyes for a moment and sighs. She wasn’t in his head. He was just that obvious.

“This must be weird for you,” she continues, not unkindly. She gestures broadly to the cab.

“It’s a real barrel of monkeys.”

Wanda smiles, but it seems from far away. “Do you even know what a barrel of monkeys is?”

“Something shitty.”

“Yep.” Wanda shifts against the wall. “You’re unusually talkative.”

Bucky just shrugs. Part of him sinks a little – a different Bucky would never have been accused of being so quiet, regardless of the truth. Maybe this was a natural thing, for once. Maybe at this age he would have finally gotten over that. He doesn’t have to talk all the time.

“So how did she do it?” Wanda asks.

His brow twitches. “What?”

“How’d she make you…” She waves her hand vaguely, unsure. He feels panic wrap around his heart, like he’s being discovered.

“Just say it,” he says gruffly.

She sighs. “How did she get you to trust her?”

He purses his lips together. Of course he had thought about it. Of course he wondered. She had no ulterior motive other than escaping a truly bad thing of a man. She was earnest in an almost uncomfortable way. She would give everything to help others. All qualities of an honest person. But that wasn’t it. He remembers the shock on her face when he first woke up. We are impossible people.

The loneliness. The overwhelming sense that they were both fish out of water.

“She’s stubborn,” he says.

“She woke you up to fix you,” Wanda says thoughtfully.

“I guess.”

“But was it working?”

Would anything ever fucking work? He feels oddly defensive. “What’s your point?”

Wanda sighs again, more annoyed now. “Nothing.” She considers her words for a moment. “To hear Steve say it, you were pretty resigned to your choice.”

He can sense what’s coming. He frowns as if to make a point.

“You’re weird about each other, is what I’m saying. You and her.”

Bucky feels the strong urge to clear his throat. He stares at the wall.

“You could do worse,” she continues.

“Don’t.”

He expects her to smile, to tease, but she just looks at him, oddly disappointed. He squeezes his arms across his chest and pointedly looks at nothing – no, he doesn’t need this. Ash doesn’t need this. It was so wildly inappropriate…

Wanda opens her mouth to say something, maybe an apology or an affirmation or the like, but as if summoned, Aisling suddenly flies awake. She takes in a gasp of air and touches her forehead. He turns entirely toward her, as if by instinct.

He’s a little self-conscious about it now…

“I saw…” Aisling stammers. “I don’t—”

Wanda reaches to her and touches Aisling’s ankle, the closest part of her. “It was just a dream.”

“What did you see?” Bucky asks.

Aisling searches about and attempts to stand. She brushes herself off deliberately. She bites her lip in thought. “It was…the horrible creature-men. I felt them.”

That’s when the train screeches to a halt.  
\--

That’s when it starts to break.

She remembered the sickly, sucking nothing too distinctly for it to be simply a dream. It was hard to ever forget it – a void where a soul was supposed to be. A hole in the universe. The dream was specific, deeply so, like when you dream and you begin to hear sounds from around you as you come close to waking up. She was ready to write it off as a symptom of feeling stuck in this train car.

But then the train suddenly screeched to a stop, and they were all thrown against the far wall. She, the only one standing, toppled to the ground, limbs askew. Her vision spun for a moment. She rolled across the floor as a box began to fall in her direction, and she saw a globe of red overhead – Wanda, grunting as she stopped some of the boxes from smashing them. Bucky leapt toward her, leaning over her prone form, shielding her from any falling objects. She instinctively kept her face toward the floor as she realized what was going on.

This wasn’t normal at all.

It seemed like an eternity passed before the train’s brakes stopped shrieking and the car finally settled into a cold, silent stop. Bucky was up at once, gathering up anything that hadn’t already been in their packs – mostly their growing collection of papers. Wanda seemed as shell-shocked as Aisling, and was crumpled up against the wall, arms out, red dusting her fingertips.

“What the hell?” Wanda managed to sputter.

“We have to go,” Bucky said.

“Where are we?” Aisling breathed.

He answered by gingerly helping them both up off the floor and tugging them toward the door. He cracked his knuckles. He looked ready to tear the great metal door apart, and with nary any effort, started to slide it open –

No.

She felt it too late. In the collapse, she lost track, and as the scattered Light returned to her, she noticed it all too well – a chasm in the world’s design, a collection of gaping black holes, hollow, beckoning…

_No!_ A scream ripped out of her mouth. There they stood, the creatures, and all five of them were lifting guns just as Bucky opened the door.  
She dove for Bucky at once.

The guns, aiming.

She felt her shoulder crash into the muscled man, her arms up in front of her chest. It was a full-on side tackle, or perhaps an attempt to get in front of Bucky, she wasn’t sure, but every inch of her was screaming, please, please don’t let this be the moment. She saw fire, shooting from a barrel. She was right in its path.

Bucky shouted in alarm.

That was it, before light erupted and blinded her.  
\--

She expected pain, or nothingness, or –

No.

Still standing. Her arms still up in front of her, burning.

That’s…not how a gunshot is supposed to feel, is it?

“Ash?”

She felt Bucky’s body against her back, but heard Wanda’s voice. Aisling’s eyes were squeezed shut, her eyelids pulsing white with light. Her hair and body were buffeted by a

strong breeze.

She opened her eyes slowly.

The creatures were all on the ground, on their backs, clearly disoriented. Their guns were on the ground many feet farther behind them, barely noticeable except for their black shapes against the white of the gathering snow. Before her, some of the snow was blown into a semi-circle shape. It was oddly silent.

She glanced at her arm, a wisp of burning left behind.

She saw one of the shield symbols – was it glowing? She blinked and it was gone. It was as dull and smudged as it ever was, perhaps even more faded than she remembered.

She should be dead, riddled with bullet holes, but she was standing tall, and they had all fallen as if blown back by some great surge of energy…

It was her.

She did that.

_I did that._

She looked at her hands, as if they’d show her answers. Nothing. Still dirty, still cold. But the occurrence was as clear to her as knowing when her own foot took a step. Another organ – the Light – wielded for a purpose. She could feel it now, an arrow nocked and ready, waiting for something as simple as a word. As simple as a thought and an action, all in one.

_Sleep. Shield. Sing._

Bucky spun her toward him. Everything was happening in slow motion. He grabbed both of her shoulders and scanned her up and down for sign of injury. He lingered on her face. She could feel his breath against her skin.

“Your nose is bleeding,” he said.

The creatures erupted into a horrible, guttural chorus. All at once, they began to charge.  
\--

Cold bit at Aisling’s face. Red energy pulsed at the edge of her vision. Wanda stepped next to Aisling, her wild, long hair curling around her waist.

“Duck,” she said.

At Wanda’s steady command, Aisling dropped immediately to the cold train floor.

Wanda growled, the sound rolling from deep out of her chest, before large boxes, groaning against their own weight, flew overhead toward the creatures. Aisling felt Bucky close beside her then, his arm right beside hers. Her hands were numb against the metal of the floor. She couldn’t help it – she looked up to watch as the boxes slammed mercilessly into the charging creatures.

“We have to leave,” Wanda said. Her gaze zeroed in on the men like a lioness on prey.

Aisling glanced at her. “Go,” she breathed. Her voice shook. The Light was spinning. Wanda stepped down from the train car with a singular grace, throwing an arm toward the creatures at the same time, sending more flying. Aisling’s joints felt frozen. Her whole body seized as the cold and the fear bore down all at once, but she pushed herself to her feet and let her body crack.

Cold buffeted her from all sides as Bucky jumped down from the train car. For a split second, she imagined quite a scene: Him, leaving her, back turned, running-jumping-flying into the creatures, silent as the witching hour, revealing nothing. Tearing them apart. Blood on his jacket, on his face, splashing into his eyes—

Aisling jumped from the train car. She stumbled against the solid ground and followed Wanda, bolting toward the tree-line. She blinked out of the intrusive thought. She felt Bucky there, right beside her, running. _He’s there. He’s right there, following close by. He could run so much faster than you, but he’s right there._

She reached for his hand just as a creature leapt right into her path.

Before Bucky could act, Aisling reached her palm out. She summoned the Light, pressed against it, pushed outward as hard as she could at the same moment her palm extended. She shouted the Sitorai word for shield.

It all turned into a blur.

Snow blew into a blinding wall, a fog of white, as she saw the shape of the creature fly far away. Energy pooled in her chest and drained out with such ferocity that she stumbled in her next step.

_Look out!_

Another one, coming from behind. In a single motion, Aisling turned and swung her hand, cutting through the air like a dancer with a knife, pressing as hard as she could against the Light, forcing her will through the crackling air. More bodies flailed helplessly against the trees or pinwheeled into the snow. Bucky threw a swift series of blows to those closing in.

Exhaustion pressed in, sickly sweet. The Sitorai describe their sensing abilities akin to a deep embrace – the universe, encircling them. Aisling had never felt that. It had always been so explicitly other. A whispering thing, asking…waiting.

Bucky stared at her, mouth slightly open.

“Run!” Aisling screamed. “Go!”

He ran. He did everything he could to keep her within arm’s reach.

It wasn’t enough.

By now, they were beyond the tree-line, diving between tall trunks, but the creatures were still coming no matter what they did. She was beginning to lose ground. Wanda and Bucky were better trained, more agile, by the Stars, knew themselves. They knew what they could do. They knew their limits. They both looked back at her, desperate, but she waved them on, even as she stumbled over fallen branches and old roots. Bucky slowed and slowed. Her heart couldn’t take this.

Sirens wailed.

Blue and red lights pierced the winter of the forest, far away.

Police. She took in a breath and chanced to reach out. The terrible points of nothingness were just behind them, but fired-up human souls were closing in, too. Bucky and

Wanda, some of the most wanted people on the planet, needed to get out.

“Police! Go!” Aisling shouted, as if it wasn’t already obvious, but she wanted Wanda and Bucky to keep running through the snow. She kept running. She breathed so heavily she felt her heart pounding behind her eyes. What would happen if she pushed too hard? Would her heart stop? Would she die midstep and dramatically collapse into the snow?

Didn’t matter. They kept looking back at her. She already knew what had to be done.

With the last of her strength, she whispered to the Light. Keep them safe.

With a final push of her palm, she pushed Bucky and Wanda away. She let the Light fly and usher them as far as it would go. As far as she could muster.  
She watched as what seemed like the wind picked them up off their feet and threw them forward, on and on, their limbs aimlessly kicking and reaching in the air.

Gunshots rang out, evoking rasping screeches from the creatures. Human men screamed and shouted, cursing God. The holes in the universe started to dissipate. Running. Dying.  
  
Bucky and Wanda were shockingly quiet as they landed harshly in the snow, many tens of feet away.

Men were shouting. “Stop! Weapons down!”

“They’re monsters!”

“Help! Help!”

More gunshots. More guttural deaths.

Wanda and Bucky turned toward her, faces open with panic, stumbling to their feet. The police would find her first. They needed to go. She thought it as hard as she could toward Wanda. _Go. Go. Go._

Aisling had long since careened to a stop. The building storm buffeted her body. She lifted her arms, and let it come after her.

All at once, Bucky seemed to realize what was happening. She watched it sink into his face. His expression melted from resigned fear to open, aching horror, mouth open, eyes bright and shiny against the growing snowstorm. He turned the rest of his body around and started to barrel toward her, limbs wild against resistance, but he was stopped by Wanda, awash in red. She watched Aisling with forlorn eyes.

_We will find you_. Wanda’s voice, a whisper in the back of her skull. _Don’t give up._

In the din, over the monsters dying cries, she heard him.

_Ash! Aisling! No! Run! COME ON! AISLING!_

Her heart squeezed. She had to do this. Wanda nodded once, using the whole brunt of her strength to continue pulling Bucky away, far into the grey blur of the forest. She couldn’t tell when he gave up. By then, she could feel the humming soul of a police officer running toward her. She couldn’t even pretend to run. She was too tired. There was no point.

She turned around. Guns, everywhere, pointing right at her.

“Get down!” one man shouted.

By then, four flashes of light were coming down from the sky behind the uniformed men. She brought a hand up to block the brightness from her vision by instinct, but then she pulled it back. She wanted to sear her eyes shut. She wanted to remember nothing more of this night. She wanted to become ice and snow, if only to forget.

She stared at the police men as they stared back. She blinked back tears. Don’t shoot. Don’t follow my friends. Don’t…

“Who called Stark?” one of the men yelled, not too cheerfully.

“Stark called Stark,” said the being lit by fire, voice hollow like a computer. The voice turned up in decibels to address her, still across the way. Some of the guns faltered at the sight of the Iron Man. Not all.

“Who are you?” Stark asked.

That would be easy to answer.

She fell to her knees, all the way down, until the snow burned her cheek, and she fainted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im baaack  
> more to come, as always. i cant quit you, aisling...


End file.
